Flaconi's Turnaround Started with Seven Bullets and No Oat Milk

Most transformation stories arrive pre-edited. By the time a CEO takes a stage to describe a successful turnaround, the difficult decisions have been absorbed into narrative arc and the timeline has been compressed into something that sounds more deliberate than it felt at the time. Bastian Sievers, CEO of Flaconi, did not do that.

Sievers spoke at Shoptalk Europe 2026 in Barcelona as part of the View from the Boardroom session. What he described was a turnaround at Germany’s leading online beauty retailer that started not with a strategy deck but with a 4am email, an all-hands meeting, and seven brutally honest bullet points on a slide. The company he inherited in October 2022 had more than 300 million euros in revenue, 400 beauty experts, a good office, and good technology. It also, when he opened the door, had four people in it, including himself.

Under Sievers’ leadership, Flaconi has reached 651 million euros in revenue, an NPS of 84, and approximately 45% of revenue flowing through its app. The route from there to here is the interesting part.

The company had no team

The most arresting detail from Sievers’ account is also the most explanatory. Flaconi, at the point he joined, was not a failing company in the conventional sense. The revenues were there. The brand was there. The infrastructure was there. What was not there was a functioning organisation. “It was a company without a team,” he said.

This matters because it reframes the conventional turnaround story. The problem Sievers was solving was not primarily a product problem or a market problem or a technology problem. It was a people and culture problem. And his view, formed over more than 25 years in e-commerce and refined through an analogy he returns to repeatedly, is that this is always where the answer starts. In football, he noted, success is not about having the best eleven players. It is about having the right people playing together with a shared strategy. The same is true in business.

The 100-day plan he had prepared, 100 days of listening before acting, lasted one and a half days. The gap he found was specific: Flaconi had deep beauty expertise but, in his assessment, only about 50% of the e-commerce capability it needed. The knowledge of the category was not in question. The execution of the business was.

Seven points on a slide, and a sense of urgency that could not wait

The all-hands meeting on Sievers’ first Wednesday at Flaconi is the scene that crystallises his leadership approach. He woke at 4am before the meeting and rewrote the presentation. The plan had been to ease in, to not change too many things too quickly. He abandoned it. “I thought: this company might die if we do not act.”

The seven points he put on the slide were unsparing: the company was buying too expensively, selling too cheaply, was not functioning as a team, had no drive to win in the market, and was operating on what he called a drug called vouchers, meaning the business was dependent on discounting to drive revenue. He looked at 200 people and could not understand why they did not understand. The financials had been shared with all employees every month. They knew the company was not making money. And yet the concern that had been escalated to him on his first day was about the CFO removing the oat milk from the kitchen.

The problem was not information. It was urgency. Sievers’ job in that meeting was to make the stakes felt, not just known. “It was on me to be completely clear, to create a genuine sense of urgency about why we needed to change.” Two or three weeks of friction followed. Then the changes started working, and for the first time Flaconi was making money.

What was cut was as important as what was kept

The “beauty in a pocket” strategy that Flaconi is now known for is built on a mobile-first premise that is unusually specific: 95% of the company’s revenue comes through mobile, with just 5% from laptop, desktop, and other devices. Building to that level of mobile commitment required removing things, not just adding them.

What Sievers cut is instructive. No private label. No marketplace. No stationary or multichannel retail. More than 40,000 drugstore articles removed from the assortment. These were not marginal activities. They were things the business had been doing. Removing them created the concentration of resource that made the mobile-first strategy viable.

This is the practical expression of the principle he articulated about purpose and profit not being in conflict. Flaconi’s NPS of 84, which Sievers said he has never seen exceeded, is the commercial consequence of ruthless focus on one thing done well. Strong retention means lower marketing spend. Lower marketing spend means profitability. “If you retain your customers, you do not need to invest as heavily in marketing. And if you do not spend as much on marketing, you make money.”

Structure follows strategy, and both follow people

The six-month period it took to build a completely new C-level and second-tier leadership structure is described by Sievers not as a painful disruption but as a necessary condition for everything else. His observation about the failure mode in large organisations is specific: when C-level leaders are fighting each other, each optimising for their own department’s KPIs, the organisation cannot execute a shared strategy. At Flaconi, the solution is structural. Every business-related function, every function that touches the customer, reports directly to him.

The reference to Jim Collins and the “Good to Great” principle of getting the right people on the bus before deciding where the bus is going is not incidental. It is the operating philosophy. “Do not be afraid to let someone go. If you really want to become a team, you sometimes need to make hard decisions at the people level.”

What this means for senior marketers

Sievers closed with a timeline, a philosophy, and a phrase. The timeline moved from fitness phase in 2022, through strategy definition and European expansion, to the “we commerce” philosophy, built around the customer, the employee, and the brand partner. The phrase for 2026 is Day One: a deliberate return to the hunger and urgency of the starting period, three years on and half a billion euros in.

The instruction he offered to anyone in the room was blunt: start today. Not tomorrow. The companies that fall behind are the ones that understand the need for change and wait for the right moment. The companies that pull ahead are the ones that decide fast, execute fast, accept the mistakes, take the learning, and go again.

Execution is the variable that separates successful companies from less successful ones. Strategy is the easy part.