My father recognised a consumer need. He was a businessman, and really lived for business. Which is how Photocolor Kreuzlingen AG was born as a photo lab for large customers. Initially, it was a traditional B2B operation. He gradually came to realise that the declarations of intent from the major customers and photo dealers often did not materialise in reality. He returned from a study trip to the USA with the idea of serving consumers directly, cutting out the middle man and providing a mail order service. In 1968, he launched with an offer of "same price as Migros, with an extra film free" and was very successful from the very start.

There were other players on the market at the time, although we were the market leader until 1981, when Fotolabo Club SA in Montpreveyres entered the market and halved our price of one franc per picture plus a free film and “freebies”. As a result, our business slumped by 20 percent in three successive years. The focus on a few formats, the halving of prices, albeit without "freebies" and the membership scheme went down well with the customers. Initially, the whole industry thought that Fotolabo would not be able to sustain these low prices for long.

Due to the continuing decline in sales, the Board of Directors applied pressure to review the company's strategy, organisation and processes, and the then Managing Director left as a result. So, fresh out of university and with just a few months of business experience as a marketing assistant, I took over the running of the company along with my mentor Karl Hagedorn, who was an old friend of the family. The aim was to define a new strategy as quickly as possible and recruit the specialists to help implement it in marketing and production. There was no need to reinvent the wheel, Fotolabo had, to some extent, shown us what to do: Get rid of the freebies, focus on the most popular film and photo formats and streamline production processes, with all measures to be implemented quickly. Another important factor was a marketing campaign that hit the spot. Our advertising agency at the time, GGK, developed a series of short television adverts featuring amateur actors. All they had to do was hold the bag showing the new price of 29 centimes, the rest was up to them. There was yodelling, just laughing, incredulity, sheer horror and all sorts of other reactions. What the men and women of all ages all had in common was their expressiveness, but it worked. Sales shot up again. We continued to expand our business until the switch from analogue to digital photography at around the turn of the millennium. We launched the first online photo service in Switzerland in 2000.

Although it started out slowly, it developed rapidly with the launch of software to design your own photo book in 2005. The customers loved it, and other products, including photo calendars, photo greeting cards, etc. were to follow.

My father always put the needs of the customer at the heart of the services he offered back in the day. This got a little lost somewhere in the interim. However, the focus is now back on the user experience and customer satisfaction.

Dealing with end consumers is in our DNA, as is a range of products which can be produced in high volumes and at high quality, with moderate pricing. In concrete terms, this meant concentrating on an attractive range of the most popular products, such as the photo book, and deliberately avoiding too many variants. The world is complex enough. As a company we want to minimise this complexity for our customers and for ourselves.

Exactly, I started in marketing and then moved to finance. In 2018, when my brother Filip decided to explore avenues outside the family business, I jumped at the chance with the support of the BoD and my father, and I've been a CEO with a passion for two years now.

Absolutely. Family businesses just have a different company culture. We think in the long term, we have short decision-making processes, we do not get involved in politics, we feel the results of our decisions first-hand a little way down the line – and this goes both ways.

Our roots are in Kreuzlingen, our family lives in the area and our company has been one of the leading employers in the region for many years. We have been very fortunate not to have had to make any redundancies over the years, despite automation. On the contrary, we have been able to create additional jobs through new job profiles and new sales markets. This is something we are proud of.

Anniversary year 2021. 60 years have passed since the photo service provider was founded. It has been an exciting transformation from a "small" family business in the 1960s to the market leader in Switzerland and Finland. ifolor was awarded the GfM Marketing Prize at the end of 2020, is currently active in fifteen countries and employs around 250 people.