Hooray! We are celebrating 20 years of supermagnete
It is hard to believe how quickly time flies: supermagnete is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year! To mark the occasion, we have come up with a few surprises for you.
Throughout the year, you will find information on current promotions on this anniversary page.
Or, subscribe to the supermagnete newsletter, and you will receive information about the anniversary promotions directly via e-mail.
The beginnings of our website
It was exactly 1. January 2003, when the online shop of www.supermagnete.ch went online. On the first day, there was not a single order. Then, on the second day, came the surprise: the first order by a complete stranger. We were overjoyed, which is why we added a few small magnets to the order as a free extra. This gesture soon became a tradition – to this day, we are still including free magnets when an order is packaged. After the first euphoria, however, there were initially days when nothing was happening at all. Despite that, we were able to record an impressive 31 orders at the end of the first month.As far as the product range of our shop was concerned, it was quite manageable in the beginning.
It included magnetic spheres, magnetic discs, magnetic rods, block magnets, cube magnets and ring magnets, all made of neodymium.
There were a total of 38 magnet sizes to choose from and the entire inventory fit on two or three shelves of a bookcase.
By 2013, the look of our online shop had already changed quite a bit; the striking orange colour had become prevalent.
Also, note the vastly improved logo.
But the appearance of the website is by no means the only change worth mentioning.
The assortment and categories of the shop grew steadily during the first 10 years.
In 2013, our inventory already included 17 million magnets.
Of course, these were no longer stored on a bookshelf, as was the case at the very beginning, but in a large warehouse located at our partner Murghof.
Anecdotes from 20 years of supermagnete
"For the filming of the Ask Fausto video number 4,
we smashed various objects with magnets.
Among them was a latex glove filled with red gelatin.
Well, we slightly underestimated how far gelatin could splatter when it is crushed by two magnets with 150 kg of adhesive force each.
To this day, you can still see red stains on the ceiling and the blinds in the room where we filmed."
- Corinne Schläpfer, Social Media & Marketing Management
"All return packages from EU orders arrive at our location in Gottmadingen.
We actually had some returns that have become legendary.
Packages with shoes, cleaning items or wall films for children all reached our warehouse.
Even a fishing rod was sent to us by mistake.
How could something like that happen? Maybe our customers got their packages mixed up for the return shipment."
- Ulrike Isak, Customer Care Representative
"The customer who placed the very first order in 2003 needed the magnets urgently for a project, but the package didn’t arrive.
So, I offered to come by train and hand the magnets over to him at the station.
Sending them by mail would have been too late.
Just before setting off on my journey, the phone rang: it turned out that the neighbour had accepted the package and was only now handing it over to him.
Delivery to the station was no longer necessary – all was well."
- Matthias Ackermann, Owner
"Originally, we wanted to make the supermagnete online shop available in all European languages.
We thought that was a great idea and, in 2006, started to expand the language offerings.
Soon, the shop was accessible in Portuguese, Finnish, Czech and even Lithuanian.
It was only at the end of 2011 that we abandoned this ambitious plan and reduced the available 18 languages to 6 core languages.
One of the reasons for this decision: at the time, Google Translator just wasn’t sophisticated enough to communicate with our customers in Russian or Romanian.
In those cases, we prefer to keep the communication in English these days."
- Marion Zollinger, Managing Director
"More than 10 years ago, we were still in a much smaller office at a different location and the supermagnete team consisted of around 25 people.
Certain things were handled a little differently back then.
For example, a colleague and I went to the neighbouring supermarket every two weeks to buy beverages and haul them to the office.
We always emptied the entire shelf.
We were quite happy with our purchases, the supermarket employees not so much."
- Pablo Schläpfer, Head of Information Technology
The 3 most popular customer projects of all time
That our customers are just as enthusiastic about our strong magnets as we are, is a fact we noticed soon after the start of our online shop. E-mail after e-mail, we kept receiving pictures of various projects that our customers had completed with the magnets they had ordered. That is why, in 2007, we decided to publish selected customer projects on our website.In the meantime, this section has grown to over 700 projects.
Now, on the occasion of our anniversary, we are revealing the three projects with the most visits.
supermagnete in videos
Throughout the years, we have regularly posted videos on our YouTube channel. Thus, a nice collection of diverse videos was created. We would like to show you a selection of these videos here because they perfectly reflect the character of supermagnete.
