Galeria boss Olivier Van den Bossche: Not a man for PowerPoint

Olivier Van den Bossche is on his way to an appointment when the three ladies in the housewares department catch his eye. “Are you okay?” asks the manager of the department store chain Galeria. “No,” sounds out of three voices at the same time, and Van den Bossche quickly steers his branch manager and then the department salesperson to the women who need advice. Obviously not knowing who is standing in front of them, the customers chuckle with satisfaction at the one-to-one care and jokingly complain about being abandoned when Van den Bossche and the branch manager Leonhard Held say goodbye to their appointment.

The new Galeria boss has to go down one floor in the Galeria department store in Bochum in order to record a video there for the workforce. Once a month, the Belgian wants to inform and motivate his employees with such messages directly from the branches. That is also necessary. Van den Bossche has been running the last German department store group since June, after completing the second insolvency procedure within a few years. Thousands of employees have lost their jobs, and another 40 department stores are being closed. There is still a struggle with landlords for individual branches, most recently Düsseldorf, Essen and Leonberg jumped off the list of closures, so 90 department stores are said to continue to exist. And something really has to happen in them so that Galeria still has a future. “We have to learn from the past, but it’s much more important to look ahead now,” says Van den Bossche. “And to shape a new company.”