It was a work in progress to begin with and we finally became operational with the online shop in 2002. We decided in the late 1990s to create an online shop for office supplies. UB: Any entrepreneur wants to be on the cutting edge of what’s going on in their particular industry and I was – and still am – no different. OPI: When did you decide to make Büromarkt Böttcher an online business? Like I said, I didn’t know anything about free-market economics and taxation or indeed about market analysis, advertising, etc. UB: The biggest challenge was acquiring the knowledge we needed. OPI: What were the main challenges for you during the early days and when Germany became a unified country? Before that we were called Kopierservice Böttcher, reflecting the early importance of the copy shop business. OPI: How long have you had the name Büromarkt Böttcher? We then slowly added office products to our offering. Initially, my wife and I used our flat as a base, but after a while we set up a small copy shop in the town of Jena. So that’s what I used to make money – take photocopies for other people.Īt the same time, I did a two-year course to become qualified in tax law. What I did have was plenty of stamina and discipline – it’s what you learn in the sporting environment I grew up in. And I still had my photocopier. At that point I had no idea about tax law, economics, marketing – anything you need in business. The flea market idea worked well for a while until the competition from what was formerly West Germany became too fierce. To advertise my services on flyers, etc, I bought a photocopier. I started organising and attending flea markets and there sold a number of things that I made myself out of plaster of Paris – garden gnomes and picture frames, for example. I started training to be a gymnastics coach instead, but soon after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 I lost my job. UB: I had a knee injury when I was 22 and had to give up my sporting career. OPI: That’s a very long way from selling office products. I was the East German junior gymnastics champion and won Spartakiad medals on several occasions. I was a child athlete and won numerous competitions during my teenage years. When I was 11, I began attending a specialist children’s sports academy where I trained for up to six hours a day, six days a week. From a very early age – as soon as I started school – my parents sent me to gymnastics classes. Udo Böttcher: I was brought up in a working-class family as one of three children in East Germany, part of what was then the communist Eastern Bloc. OPI: Let’s start with Udo Böttcher the man, rather than your company. Büromarkt Böttcher celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2015, so a timely occasion for OPI’s Heike Dieckmann to catch up with company founder and CEO Udo Böttcher and take a look back at what makes the company one of the most talked-about online resellers. Success hasn’t happened overnight, however. And that’s not from a small base – the company broke through the F100 million barrier ($109 million) in 2014, more than small fry compared with the likes of Staples, Printus and Viking.

Most impressively, it continues to post phenomenal growth rates – 23% in 2014 and an astonishing 40% in 2015. Büromarkt Böttcher is one of the largest online OP players in the German market, right up there with the biggest and best of them.

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