Exclusive: Jimdo lays off employees

The Hamburg-based start-up fired parts of its marketing team on Monday. Managing Director Henze speaks of a necessary restructuring.

After a video call, it was all over for some employees of the Hamburg-based start-up Jimdo. The marketing team was not profitable enough, CEO and founder Matthias Henze is said to have told them there; he himself told Startbase that his expectations had not been met. They then received their letter of termination and a settlement agreement with strict confidentiality clauses.

Those who sign it are not allowed to make any "detrimental or unfriendly statements" in relation to Jimdo, "especially in the press or on social media", it says. The letter of termination simply states the following reason: "We have explained the reasons for our decision to you in a personal conversation." Both contracts are available to Startbase .

The flagship start-up dismissed the employees mercilessly, one of the dismissed employees, who would rather not have her name in the press, told Startbase. "The dismissed colleagues are disappointed and stunned by the prompt dismissal." Many obviously feel unfairly treated. "Since Jimdo doesn't have a works council, decisions were made about who had to go without taking any social and individual situations into account," one of the dismissed employees accuses the start-up.

Among other things, Jimdo offers a construction kit for websites and a professional online store. The start-up focuses primarily on the self-employed, sees itself as a one-stop store solution and also helps to create legal texts for websites and online stores that are protected against warnings. "For us, you self-employed people are the true heroes of our economy," it advertises on its website. According to the company, websites have already been created in more than 190 countries using Jimdo's services and 32 million websites and stores have been built.

If you talk to founder and CEO Matthias Henze himself, the first thing you'll hear is that the company has grown considerably in terms of staff. "Before the pandemic, we employed around 200 people, now we have 340," he says. More and more products for solo self-employed people have been added in recent years.

The start-up has already experienced a large wave of redundancies. In the fall of 2016, Managing Director Henze made a quarter of his workforce redundant - despite the fact that the company was still in good shape at the time, according to the founder in an interview with Impulse had a successful financial year behind it. The reason he gave was that product development had been too slow.

In view of the recent redundancies, the mood among the workforce is evidently poor. Those who stayed are now wondering what is going on and whether they will be next, at least according to those who have been made redundant. There are also rumors that the start-up now wants to outsource its marketing to the USA. Jimdo should be honest and say why they really made so many people redundant overnight for no reason.

"We are not where we want to be with marketing. That was the reason for the restructuring," Henze told Startbase. The start-up therefore laid off under 20 employees from the marketing department. He does not want to comment on how large the unit still is, what the future holds for it - and whether more marketing is to be outsourced to the USA. "It was important to us to explain the reasons to people individually," he says. "We tried to find the most humane way possible to make the redundancies," says Henze. However, this is always difficult in Remote. However, Henze, who says he has also taken part in talks, does not want to be more specific. The Managing Director does not want to talk about "not profitable enough" in this context. Marketing is usually an upfront investment.

The fact that a department is "not profitable" is not in itself a reason for dismissal anyway, says Nathalie Oberthür, a specialist lawyer for employment law and chair of the employment law committee at the German Bar Association. "However, it can be the motivation for a business decision that eliminates the need for employment and can therefore justify a dismissal." This could actually include giving up marketing activities or outsourcing them to external service providers. The wording on confidentiality and the requirement not to make any damaging statements to the press if the settlement agreement is signed are also common.