How people get to work with us (part 2)

Did you read part 1 of this series? After starting off with individual little interviews, then simply asking everyone in our Berlin and Amsterdam offices – not to forget San Francisco of course – it turned out that almost everyone indeed had a beautiful contribution to make about how they came to Edenspiekermann … enjoy!

Sharon Walsh describes her journey here “as simple or as complicated as you need.“ She applied to be an intern through “Somewhere”, and then “Marie got in touch, we skyped. I happened to be visiting a friend in Berlin the following week anyway and Katja invited me in for a chat and they offered me the role. Two months later, I was here …”

“But perhaps the more interesting aspect,” she adds, “would be why I wanted to work here (besides obviously working for Erik) – the college I went to in Ireland had a past pupil, two years my senior, who went to work for the Dutch Edenspiekermann office, and as a result, she was the biggest success story of our college course. Our lecturer talked about Espi all the time and used it as a benchmark of success, so funnily enough, I had bookmarked the jobs page at Espi in my second year in college, promising myself that one day I would apply. And so I did & the rest is history. :)“

Also Julia Sysmalainen came from far away: Finland. She wrote a story about her arrival in Berlin and her first encounters with this strange new culture – like meeting Erik Spiekermann in an impressive Hawaiian shirt. He surprised her with the German “Du”, our informal way of addressing each other, from the very first minute. Later Julia got to know how unusual this was (not for him, but for Germany).

Surprises didn’t end with Erik’s team, the United Designers Network, at Motzstraße in the Schöneberg district of Berlin. Julia remembers the name set in Erik’s brandnew FF Unit – more modern than the whole area around. The place itself was far from what you would have expected a famous designer’s studio to be like: “small and cosy”. For bad weather they even had a “Filzlatschenschrank”, a quite untranslatable locker for felt slippers. The designers had to wear them when coming from the rain, to not damage the white floor (which could be a bit much for stylish designers of today) …

Anyways, our office now is big, but still cosy!

My idea of working

Sabrina Feuerherd put it as follows: “The story starts when I was a young child. It was a warm summer evening and I had just ... no, just kiddin’. I wanted to live in Berlin and was looking for an interesting place that would fit my idea of working. Espi was on top of my list and I applied as an intern. Katja interviewed me, showed me around the office and introduced me to the Service Design Cloud. Two days later I was invited to work here. I’ve been loving it ever since.”

Jorim de Roos from our Dutch team wrote: “Hi Sonja, I googled Service Design companies in Amsterdam while I was looking for an internship. I saw a job opening for an intern, called Mirjam, and that’s how I got here :) Good luck!“

I read some blog posts …

Björn Richter got to know Edenspiekermann via his teacher: “I think the first time I heard from Espi was by my Prof. Boris Müller from University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. In our course last semester we had a Keynote workshop for prototyping with Paul Woods. As I searched for an agency for my internship, I had this in mind and visited the Espi homepage. I was pretty excited about the page design, the projects (especially RB-Radio) and mostly about the philosophy of agile. I read some blog posts, also this one of a former intern, and decided to apply. After sending my application, we had the mentioned workshop and I sent a further application again. Second time in English and to Paul directly. Safety first :)”

Charles Axel Pauwels put it even more pragmatic: “Not really the most interesting or inspiring story, but I landed here after applying for an internship position.“

And Grit Noach even shorter: “Just via Designerdock, sorry :)”

Mine is quite boring

Lorenz Seeger experienced coincidence: “The day my former boss left the company and the whole digital team would have to reorganize again, I got a message from Steven Cook who told me that ESPI is in need of a digital designer, starting as soon as possible, and if we could meet. Now that was a coincidence.”

Matt Berridge suggests his story as being “quite boring”: “I wanted to move to Berlin so looked for the best agency I could find doing the forward-thinking web stuff I wanted to work with. They wanted me to move at the start of winter but I said no, I would move half way through instead ;)“

Look forward to part 3 – with even more “boring” stories.