Poco (furniture store)

POCO Einrichtungsmärkte GmbH
legal form	GmbH
founding	1972
Seat	Germany Bergkamen , North Rhine-Westphalia ; Hardegsen , Lower Saxony ;
management	Executive Director: Thomas Stolletz; Hans-Ralf Großkord;
Number of employees	6950 (2016)
sales	1.29 billion euros (2016)
Branch	Retail ( furniture trade , kitchens, housewares , gifts, carpets, floor coverings, electronics, wallpapers, paints, home textiles)
Website	www.poco.de

Branch in Berlin, Siemensdamm

Poco (spelling: POCO ) is a German furniture discounter with offices in Bergkamen and Hardegsen with 125 furniture stores and four regional warehouses (as of June 1, 2019). The company is an acronym for Pohlmann & Co., named after the company founder. The company merged with the former domain furniture stores in 2008. There are therefore two head offices responsible for managing the branches - the former Poco head office in Bergkamen and the former Domain head office in Hardegsen.

history

Poco

The retail salesman Peter Pohlmann founded Poco (Pohlmann & Co) in 1989. The first market was opened in Ahlen under the motto “Nice living for less money”. In the following years the number of branches grew steadily. In 1999 sales were 271 million D-Marks . Poco traditionally has a dense network of furnishing markets in North Rhine-Westphalia around the metropolitan areas on the Rhine and Ruhr and initially expanded to include Baden-Württemberg , Bremen , Hesse , Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein .

Carpet domain Harste

In 1972, Karl-Heinz Rehkopf and Rainer Wunderlich founded the company Carpet Domain Harste GmbH & Co. KG in an estate (hence the name "Domain"). The first store opened in Harste in the same year and initially sold overproduction of carpets, and later also other DIY store product ranges. In 1986, the two company founders separated. Rehkopf continued to run the Harste carpet domain, which specializes in floor coverings and home textiles and now operates as tedox , while Wunderlich changed the concept towards furniture with its new managing director Helmut Reitz. Wunderlich's company was called Domain Furnishing Markets .

Poco headquarters in Bergkamen

Merger of Poco and Domain

In 2002, a close cooperation in purchasing goods from Poco and the domain furnishing markets was agreed. After the meanwhile partial takeover of shares in the then 29 Domain furnishing stores by the Austrian XXXLutz Group in 2005 and the conversion of 24 German stores of the XXXLutz chain Möbelix to the brand name Domain, XXXLutz sold its Domain shares to the new in 2008 founded POCO-Domain-Holding GmbH, of which Andreas Seifert, one of the directors of XXXLutz, held 50% of the shares as a private person. The sale of shares became necessary because of complaints from the Federal Cartel Office. Domain had built up a comprehensive network of markets in the north as well as in Berlin, Munich and the new federal states. The new partners operated with their XXXLutz, Möbelix and Poco branches on regionally different markets, so that after the merger the entire company had a nationwide presence.

A joint holding company, POCO -domain-Holding GmbH, was then founded on January 1, 2008. A James Moore with a letterbox address in Belgium was given as the founder of the holding. The former 25 Poco and 59 Domain branches were now known to consumers as the POCO Domain. The current name Poco was chosen in 2012 as a new company (Poco Einrichtungsmärkte GmbH) and brand name (POCO) due to the umlauts that hindered international expansion and the shorter spelling.

Poco today

In 2017, 118 furniture stores across Germany operated under the umbrella of POCO -domain-Holding GmbH with an average of 4,600 m² sales area and a total of over 7,000 employees. They generated annual sales of over € 1.2 billion. Up to six new stores are created every year. The company also operates a store in Australia (Blacktown) under the name Poco Super Home Market , one in the Netherlands ( Enschede ) and one in Poland ( Wrocław ), while stores in South Africa have been sold again after the Steinhoff scandal.

Thomas Stolletz (formerly POCO) and Hans-Ralf Großkord (formerly Domain) are the managing directors of POCO-Domain-Holding GmbH, based in Bergkamen, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Hardegsen, Lower Saxony. The other two previous managing directors Helmut Reitz (formerly Domain) and Jürgen Wiederhold (formerly Poco) switched to the Supervisory Board. The former Poco partner and namesake Peter Pohlmann left the company.

From 2008, POCO-Domain-Holding GmbH belonged to 50 percent to the internationally operating Steinhoff Group (Steinhoff Europe) and to 50 percent to the owner family of the Austrian furniture chain XXXLutz. In April 2018, XXXLutz internally announced the purchase of 100% of the rights in the Poco company.

Poco advertisement

From September 2011 to spring 2017 Daniela Katzenberger was the advertising face of Poco. She was replaced to a lesser extent by Markus Maria Profitlich and Janine Kunze .

In 2019, a Poco series started on YouTube with Janine Kunze in the lead role.

Camp fires in 2014 and 2015

On February 10, 2014, an external warehouse of the group burned down in Hagen-Vorhalle . The fire broke out in the roof structure at around 11:20 a.m. and spread across the entire building. The roof collapsed as a result. An employee of the furniture store chain was injured.

On the night of May 22, 2015, at around 3:20 a.m., there was a fire in a warehouse in Cologne-Eil , the cause and extent of which have not yet been clarified. However, according to initial findings, there are no injuries. One of the nine warehouses was completely destroyed. Four days after the warehouse fire, the furniture store received a ransom note with claims totaling 2 million euros. If this sum is not paid, further fires threatened until all warehouses were destroyed.

The major fire on the night of June 1, 2015 was described by the city of Aachen as the “biggest fire in Aachen in the last 30 years ”. Starting from the source of the fire in the Poco warehouse, a fitness studio and an indoor soccer hall were destroyed. At times, up to 150 firefighters were on duty. The total damage from the fires in Cologne and Aachen amounted to around five million euros.

In November 2015, the trial of one of the arsonists, a 44-year-old from Lohmar, was opened. He asserted that he had acted alone and that his two accomplices were merely an invention to increase the pressure on the furniture store. He confessed to the arson in Cologne and Aachen, but asserted in court that he only wanted to "burn something" in the corners of the halls. As a motive, he cited his high debts of almost 100,000 euros. On November 26, the arsonist was sentenced to seven years in prison after the prosecution called for eight years in prison.