Roman Kirsch

Roman Kirsch (born July 3, 1988 in Alma-Ata , Kazakh SSR ) is a German entrepreneur and investor in the fields of technology and trade. In January 2016, the US business magazine Forbes included Kirsch in its “30 under 30 Europe” list.

Life

Roman Kirsch was born in 1988 in Alma-Ata, the capital of the Kazakh Socialist Soviet Republic , and emigrated to Germany with his parents in 1993 . He grew up in Hamburg. As one of the few students in his class, he was able to get a high school recommendation.

Education

Kirsch completed his studies at the German business school WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. He then obtained a Master of Science degree in Finance, Accounting and Management from the London School of Economics . He also studied for some time at the University of Southern California and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore.

Career

In 2002, at the age of 15, Kirsch founded his first company, a souvenir shop in Hamburg. As an intern he worked for Bang & Olufsen, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs. In 2011 Kirsch founded the furniture company Casacanda, which was acquired by Fab.com in February 2012 . He worked for a year as CEO of Fab Europe. At Casacanda and Fab, Kirsch stood out for its particularly innovative advertising via social media, such as Facebook and Instagram, and a new approach to automating loyalty marketing for online retailers. This is one of the reasons why he was named one of the 10 most influential people in the digital marketing industry by Horizont and the “Online Marketing Rockstars”. In 2012 Roman Kirsch also began to work as an investor and business angel. He was one of the co-founders and first investor in Amorelie. Amorelie was sold to the Pro7Sat1 group in 2015 and is currently valued at € 100m.

In 2013, Kirsch founded the Berlin-based e-commerce start-up Lesara together with Matthias Wilrich and Robin Müller with himself as the company's managing director. The online retailer for affordable fashion and lifestyle products is a pioneer in the area of agile retail, the data-driven, agile development and production of products. This new form of trading, developed by Kirsch, has received the Global Supply Chain Innovator Award from the US market research institute Gartner, among others.

As a business angel, Kirsch invests in numerous companies, including Amorelie, Carprice, Fittea, Sunshine Smile and Seven Senders. In January 2016, the US business magazine Forbes put Kirsch on its “30 under 30 Europe” list for retail and e-commerce. In November 2017, the German business magazine Capital named him in 2017 with the inclusion in its "Young Elite - the Top 40 under 40" list.

In addition, Kirsch acts as the “Global Shaper” of the World Economic Forum Davos and is a regular speaker at ShopTalk, the world's largest conference for retail and e-commerce.

On November 9, 2018, his e-commerce company Lesara filed for bankruptcy under self-administration and announced on February 1, 2019 that it would be broken up after the last potential investor had jumped off.

criticism

As managing director of Lesara GmbH, Kirsch was also repeatedly criticized. Kirsch and Lesara have been repeatedly accused in recent years of misleading customers with unfair marketing methods. The online startup magazine Gruenderszene.de invited Kirsch to the "hot seat" based on the 2014 coverage. In September 2016, the Swiss consumer website observer.ch reported on illegal discounts from Lesara in Switzerland and quoted Guido Sutter, chief lawyer at the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs Seco, "Lesara will now be warned". An article on spiegel.de criticized the focus on the product range, which mainly comes from Asia, with reference to the generally poor working conditions in Chinese factories. Kirsch responded to the Spiegel Online article with a reply on his private blog. The customer reviews for Lesara.de on Trustpilot.com also have an average rating of only 3 out of 5 stars. In spring 2018, the manager magazin reported that Lesara’s sales figures have been embellished by the fact that returns are not factored out. After Lesara had to file for bankruptcy, Kirsch blamed, among other things, the late disbursement of a loan from the local savings bank. A spokesman for the company contradicted this representation, however, and emphasized that it is generally common experience that “inexperienced borrowers lose sight of the very individually negotiated terms”.