Our first GENEfest: Moonlight Sea Swim, Returns Management and Camping in the office.

There are two crucial elements to GENE’s culture. 

One is our obsession with doing great work. And, how we put that above everything, including our own profits. 

The other one is balancing our stubborn insistence on hiring the best people wherever they live, with our belief that there is special energy when we all come together in the same physical space.

In other words, our “Work Where You Work Best” mantra.

GENEfest is a demonstration of these ideas brought together.

The concept is simple: two days to prototype products to solve important problems in ecommerce. Problems like return management, account area design and ecommerce personalisation. 

And to make things interesting, we asked everybody in the company to come up with fun, enlightening or downright odd activities they wanted to organise for breaks between working sessions. 

Our initial brief for the festival: Dragon’s Den meets Glastonbury. 

Without Peter Jones, of course. 

By GENE, for GENE.

We could have hired people to run team-building activities for us.

But where’s the bravery, the self-expression, the fun in that? 

During GENEfest, we asked everybody to host their activities and run them. 

Whether it was Crafts, Sea Swim, Yoga, Unconference, Quiz, Dance or any of the surprises along the way, it had to be entirely master-minded by one of us, then gifted to all of us.  

The GENEfest Makeathon

The centre stage was for the Makeathon, our hunt for new ideas to solve old problems in ecommerce. 

We put together teams and asked them to take away a problem. Then, they had to come back at the end of the following day with a business case and a technical approach.  

Every team had to pitch their presentations to a panel of judges composed of our CEO and technical directors.  

The stakes were high: not only did the winning team get a day off, but they also had a chance to make their product into a Brainwave, our Research and Development side of the business where we make products that make ecommerce better. 

The winning team pitched a brilliant idea for a product for Returns Management, helping retailers decrease returns and increase lifetime value. Stay tuned as we bring this Brainwave to life.

The future for GENEfest? More of it. 

We believe innovative technology is the key to delivering better ecommerce for merchants, customers and the industry at large. 

But, innovation can only happen when we’re willing to “waste” time, make mistakes and embarrass ourselves. To fail all the way to victory. 

This is why innovation needs space, a special kind of it. 

We also believe employee (we prefer to say people) engagement is in crisis. 

Businesses think that people are motivated by money, status-promotion, bean bags, ping pong tables and trips to Ibiza.  

Money is great, and so is ping pong, but genuine talent is looking for more:  Getting that right is our never-ending quest to understand what makes for a high-functioning and healthy culture. 

Next year is GENE’s 10th anniversary: we have a duty to be epic. We will bring GENEfest back with the force of a million suns. Get in touch if you are curious.