Welcome to PUMA

So I reckon it’s about time to talk about PUMA.  First impressions, very classy, stylishly designed buildings.  Bold, but not obnoxious.  Lot’s of red, white, and dark grey.  Everything clean.  I can’t just take pictures everywhere for secrecy’s sake, but I’ll get some up over the next few days.  There are two main buildings in Herzo.  I’m in the one on the edge of town that is larger, and conveniently attached to the PUMA store and Factory outlet store which I just visited today finally.  I do have a discount, but I won’t have money till my paycheck comes at the end of the month so I’ll just have to wait.  Difficult I must say!

Second impressions, at my desk and explored the nearby rooms, it was overwhelming how many shoes were everywhere.  Boxes of shoes and prototypes.  Shelves labeled country after country after season after year after category of shoes at different stages in development.  I’m sure there are over $100,000 worth of shoes on my floor of the building when you consider that most of them are prototypes.  That basically just means only 3 pairs were made for testing etc, and since they aren’t at the stage of being mass produced yet, they cost a fair penny to make.

As I was walked around the office and introduced to people, it was amazing to see that the daily work of such a small group of people (relatively) could be recognized and known by so many millions.  I mean, I would say there are at least 1,000 pair of PUMA’s at the RIT campus alone, and I’ve met the people already who have designed over half of them as well as the however many million other pairs around the world.  The downside to all of this is, that to run such a big system so well, there is loads of bookkeeping and database organizing etc...  That’s what I’ve been learning this week.  There is a lot of dry, necessary, background understanding required before you can do anything interesting.  My boss is on vacation this week and his boss is sick, but when one of them gets back, I can expect to learn more about what will be expected of me over the next 12 months.  I don’t expect to really know anything until next week.

Here’s something cool.  I guess in Germany you’re supposed to work 39 hour weeks, but PUMA says, “no, let’s do 40, but we’ll save up those extra hours you’ve worked and give you extra time off at Christmas.”  That way, everyone has off from Christmas to New Years, without even using vacation time!