Why this CEO left a Zalando executive role to build a furniture startup
Gemma Comabella · full episode
The experience behind it
More than fifteen years delivering CX strategy, operations and performance for some of the largest companies in the world.
I specialise in complex delivery structures, the ones where operational experience decides whether a long-term CX and outsourcing strategy holds.
That work spans CX, customer success, machine learning and data operations, trust and safety and engineering, across EMEA, Africa, South America, India, Japan and South East Asia. Different cultures, languages and contracting models, not one model exported everywhere.
My client portfolio has included Apple, BOSE and Google. I have run portfolios worth up to $350 million a year, grown client ARR by 200 per cent, and taken more than twenty per cent out of yearly operating costs with no impact on brand or performance.
I have also built delivery from nothing, opening sites in Bucharest, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Phoenix, El Salvador and Lima.
So I know how a programme of that size is built, how it is governed, and how it comes apart. What a transition looks like when it is going wrong in week three. Which commitments in a proposal were written by someone who was never going to have to deliver them.
