How I started working at LOFT

In September 2011 my girlfriend and I decided we wanted to live together. We’ve been dating for almost 2 years and the traffic jammed commute between Haarlem, where she lived, and Utrecht where I lived led to this decision. After some debate on choice of city, we decided we should look for a place after our holiday in Indonesia. So after a great holiday we started looking for a place. In just 2 days we came across a place that ticked all the boxes. Two days later we and 3 other couples had the chance to look at it and decide whether we would like to rent it. After the 1 hour visit we fell in love with the place and decided we would like to rent it. After a few nerve-wrecking days the news came we were the chosen ones. Great news! Now we could start decorating. The thing was, we both had stuff but we didn’t have a clue how this would look in this new apartment. We had been there once, we had some pictures but no measurements. The online room planners didn’t offer a solution. With me starting my job at a large IT consultancy agency I wondered, isn’t there a better way?

This same question popped in the minds of Jan Hein Pullens and Pieter Aarts a few years before that. They’ve seen a drastic change in retail due to the rise of ecommerce and the multiple channels customers had available. At the time no real solution was available. The same time consuming and hard to use room planners I had to work with, and no real online and offline integration provided by retailers. So they decided to develop LOFT. The online experience engine that allows users to simply create a 3D model of their own room using a 2D picture. After a few successful clients, proving there is a better way, and becoming more than just a startup, LOFT needed a professional Marketing approach and thus a dedicated Marketing Manager.

In the meantime I had been working at this large IT consultancy agency and developed a bigger passion for great technology, user experience and business value. So when Jan Hein reached out to my girlfriend, asking if she could be LOFT’s new Social Media marketer and she said no, I stepped in. Marketing, new technology, start uppy, business value, user experience and Social Media were the keywords for this job. My kind of job. After a few meetings with the CEO, COO and CCO it was decided. I would become the new Marketing & Channel Manager at LOFT NedSense. And so now I’m writing this blogpost just 4 days into my new job here at LOFT. And I can say; yes there is a better way to be in retail today!