We’ve had some special visitors to Draper’s Spiceland headquarters the past few days. Tomas Andersson and Anna Reljanovic from our Swedish subsidiary, Draper Europe, spent most of the week here.
Around the table, from left to right: Penny Sitler, Tomas Andersson, Anna Reljanovic, Jentry Wittkamper, and Jason Schober going over some Draper management tools.
“Every year we bring some of the folks from Draper Europe in for continued training on all of our new screen materials and new products,” according to Draper Export Manager Jentry Wittkamper (CTS). “We discuss the previous year, and make plans for the coming year.”
Tomas is the Sales Manager of Draper Europe AB, while Anna handles Marketing and Communications. They spent their time meeting with sales, marketing, and production staffers before boarding a plane back to Sweden yesterday evening.
“I always look forward to this annual meeting because we can all learn so much from one another. We can share updates on new and upcoming products, ways that we approach sales and marketing, and tools we use,” Jentry says. “In return, our Draper Europe colleagues can give us some tips on how they handle these areas, and help us better understand the European market.”
Jentry spent most of his time with Tomas, looking at sales, management, marketing, and product information.
Anna showing great restraint, not giving Terry the slap he deserves for goofing around. By the way, her sign reads “Anna, not Hannah.”
“Our number one goal with this trip was to introduce Anna to Draper,” Tomas says of the trip. “Of course we also wanted to work on sales planning for next year, and to start planning our presence at the Integrated Systems Europe show which is early in 2016. We also plan to expand our shade product offering next year, so it was good to be able to make progress on that.”
Anna, as Tomas alluded to, spent most of her time with her counterparts in the Draper advertising department. Anna is relatively new to Draper Europe, and this was her first visit to Spiceland.
“It was a very informative trip—I learned a lot about Draper and about some tools that will help me as we develop the Draper Europe website to be more in line with the main Draper site,” she says. “Indiana was fantastic and I’d love to come back again.”
You’ll be able to learn more about Anna and Tomas soon. In the next couple of weeks each will be featured in a “Why Draper” post. I’m sure you will find them as interesting, friendly, and professional as we all did!
