The Management

Philip Rooke, CEO

In August 2009, Phil was made Spreadshirt's vice president and Managing director. He was responsible for the Shop Partner and Direct-to-Customer departments. In August 2010, he became part of Spreadshirt's management team and acted as Chief Marketing Officer. In May 2011, Phil was appointed as Spreadshirt's CEO and has been fostering the company's growth ever since. Phil possesses expedient experience in the e-commerce sector. Previously, he had worked for several media companies and start-ups as well as one of the UK's biggest retailers.

After beginning his career in advertising, Philip's professional ascent has been distinguishsed by high calibre roles within a variety of organisations. In the 1990s he joined Carlton Online as the Advertising and Sales Director and left as Managing Director two and a half years later to join Tesco.com as CEO of ivillage. There Philip led his team to launch the UK's first online DVD rental shop, as well as the development and execution of its travel site and grocery site. His final role before joining Spreadshirt was working with the largest online retailer of skincare in North America, SkinStore.com, where he launched SkinStore.co.uk as a startup in the UK.

Philip's many years of managing ecommerce businesses has allowed him to see how Internet business models have evolved and new technologies emerged, providing him with first hand experience of discovering and implementing best practices in the Internet sector.

Matthias Spiess, Founder & CTO

Matthias co-founded Spreadshirt, while running the most successful dot-bomb watch site in Germany. He was the major shop partner and saw a great opportunity to grow a successful business out of this model. Matthias offered to join forces with Lukasz Gadowski on Spreadshirt, and then, financed the growth during Spreadshirt's first years, while Lukasz attended university.

Matthias' studies in philosophy and electro-technology at the University of Dresden and the University of Technology in Berlin, and his work experience for heavyweights like Siemens, as well as several internet and media related start-ups, prepared him well to balance the team.

Matthias led the platform definition and cleared the way for a new market - selling directly to customers. The ability for individuals to design one-off shirts without the need to set-up a shop, now makes up 40% of the business.

Tobias Schaugg, CFO

Tobias joined up with Spreadshirt as CFO in August 2009. He previously held management positions at Europe's largest online pharmacy DocMorris, at the waste management and recycling service Cleanaway, at the telecommunications company MCI, as well as at the first commercial internet service provider UUNET.

Tobias is originally from southern Germany. After completing his degree in business administration in Erlangen, he gained experience in the finance departments of fast-growing and internationally active companies. As the director of controlling at UUNET, Tobias spent three years working in Amsterdam where he led multinational teams.

He specialises in finance and controlling systems, as well as in customer models for planning, relationship management and marketing, and business intelligence solutions.

Jürgen Gauger, COO

Jürgen joined Spreadshirt in September 2009 where he acted as Global Production Director. In July 2011 he was appointed Chief Operating Officer. Jürgen has always put a strong emphasis on continually optimising processes and quality at all three of our production sites (Leipzig, Germany; Legnica, Poland; Greensburg, USA). In this way, he managed to improve delivery times while maintaining the best possible product quality.

Jürgen graduated from the University of Karlsruhe with a degree in Business Administration and Engineering. He then joined a leading cosmetics firm to optimise value-added chains. Acting as Sales & Operations Manager for Kodak, he optimised work flow procedures in an environment that was highly dependent on seasonal demand and held very high quality standards. Today Jürgen offers his profound knowledge in production to help Spreadshirt maintain both its quality standards and to meet the challenges related to an ever growing production.