Matthias Wlaka joins the bonprix Executive Board as CIO

With effect from 1 January 2024, Matthias Wlaka will join the bonprix Group as the new Managing Director for Technology and will lead the company together with Dr Richard Gottwald (Chairman), Markus Fuchshofen, Dr Kai Heck and Carolin Klar. In the newly created position of Chief Information Officer (CIO), Wlaka will be responsible for centrally bundling, synchronising and managing bonprix's IT activities.

The new bonprix Managing Director Matthias Wlaka comes from OTTO, where he started in 2013 and most recently held the position of Director of IT. Milestones in his ten-year successful career at the company included the successful replacement of HOST with CORE and the IT management of OTTO's transformation into a platform. Under his leadership, the procedural and technological setup for the marketplace was developed and the migration from retail to platform business was implemented. In addition, as a member of the management team, the trained computer scientist played a key role in setting up the company's own payment service provider, OTTO Payments. Matthias Wlaka started his career at the management consultancy Accenture, where he worked for twelve years, many of them in international project structures.

Marcus Ackermann, Group Executive Board Member for Multichannel Distance Selling: ‘At the Otto Group, Matthias Wlaka has impressively demonstrated his expertise in managing highly complex technology issues within a business model. I am convinced that, as the new CIO of our focus company bonprix, he will play a key role in driving forward IT and digitalisation issues within the strategic transformation of the fashion brand.’

Dr Richard Gottwald, CEO of the bonprix Group, is looking forward to working with him: ‘Matthias Wlaka is an asset to bonprix. Not only will he increase our technological clout, but we are also gaining a strong leader and a great colleague who fits in very well with our corporate culture.’

About the Otto Group

Founded in Germany in 1949, the Otto Group is now a global retail and services group with around 41,000 employees in 30 major corporate groups, primarily in the three economic regions of Germany, the rest of Europe and the USA. Its business activities cover the segments of platforms, brand concepts, retailers, services and financial services. In the 2022/23 financial year (28 February 2023), the Otto Group generated sales of €16.2 billion. With online sales of around €12 billion, it is one of the world's largest online retailers. The group's particular strength lies in its ability to offer a wide range of products and services to diverse target groups in relevant regions around the world. A large number of strategic partnerships and joint ventures offer the Otto Group excellent conditions for knowledge transfer and the exploitation of synergy potential. At the same time, a high degree of corporate responsibility and willingness to collaborate among the group companies guarantees flexibility and customer proximity as well as optimal targeting of customer groups in the respective countries.