K5 2019 - Big, Bigger, Biggest

Beginning of June the city of Berlin hosted Central Europe's largest eCommerce Conference, the K5 with 3,000+ attendees and about 150 speakers including brands like About You, Amazon, Audi, Douglas, Fanatics, Instagram, Takeaway and Wayfair. Within a few years K5-founders Jochen Krisch and Sven Rittau overtook the existing traditional events to build a platform around the topic "modern retail" with a strong emphasis around technology and disrupting business models. There had been many recaps written, if you are interested in those check them out here, here and here. For those of you who are not familiar with the K5, from a US perspective you can best compare it to the Shoptalk conference which is also a young format and outpaced the other events in the online retail space that had been around for a while.

To me the K5 is a very personal event. Not only do I know both Jochen and Sven since a very long time, there are more things in common than you might know:

• The K5 conference started in Munich in 2011, the city where I also live and founded commercetools (and where still today is its global HQ).
• The K5 moved to Berlin in 2016 as they audience grew and the Estrel hotel became the new home. And again we stayed close, literally: Our commercetools Berlin office is a 1-minute walk away, next door just across the river.
• We introduced the world's first API-led Commerce platform, at that time we called it SPHERE.IO (what later became the commercetools platform), in 2013 at the Exceed Conference in Berlin, a precursor of what happened to move into the K5BLN.

You can read the full story of the K5 events here. Over the course of the last years the K5 grew to a large event and networking platform and we tried to support as a sponsor while continuously growing our business. This year we had been the main sponsor at the event and contributed not only with an amazing 2-level booth that had been a great platform to our attending partners Arithnea, Bloomreach, Magnolia, Mindcurv, Shopmacher and Valtech, but also we highlighted with our own Audi etron the Functions-on-Demand case which is enabled by the commercetools platform. Next to our booth we hosted a side stage with an amazing speaker line up. My personal highlight was Henning Henningsen from Audi, who gave a detailed talk about Audi's digital commerce platform.

To run the risk of sounding sentimental: Over the last years we grew with commercetools at an exceptional high level and opened offices in US, UK, Netherlands and Singapore. At the time of the first K5 we had been around 20 people, today we are 200+ and count some of the largest brands, manufactures and retailers to our customers. At that speed of growth you often don't look back and you can't really compare your business today to 10 years ago. The K5 actually allowed me to do so by checking out some photos:

Above you see our first booth ever (it was 2008, CI re-branding happened around 2013/2014), at the bottom you see parts of our setup for K5 in 2019.

I am not a believer in superstition but it seems as K5 grows fast, we do, too. Therefore I wish Jochen, Sven, Christiane, Verena and the whole team to keep that great momentum and am confident on the continued success of their conference.

So what's next for commercetools. You will find us Singapore at the Seamless Conference in June, as well as for the Online Retailer event in Australia in July.