Zeeman

Origins and acquisitions (1967–1998)

Jan Zeeman was born in Velsen in 1942. His father had been a peddler who, with one of his seven brothers, sold fabric remnants and tea towels door to door during the Great Depression, without earning enough to cover the rent. Zeeman opened his first shop in Alphen aan den Rijn on 16 March 1967. Self-service was still unusual in Dutch shops at the time, and he relied on bulk buying and efficient organisation to sell at lower prices than his competitors. He described the principle as "good clothing and basic textiles do not need to be expensive". A second store opened in Zwanenburg soon afterwards, and a third in Woerden in 1969. Zeeman made his first buying trip to East Asia in 1970, and in 1971 the business took a warehouse and office in Zwammerdam; the warehouse moved to Alphen aan den Rijn in 1975.

By 1974 Zeeman had opened seventeen stores of its own. That year it bought the thirteen fashion stores of the Vinke chain, the first of a string of acquisitions. It took over the thirty Gazan stores, some of them in Belgium, in 1976, followed by the Vroom department stores and the 25 branches of Favetex. In 1980, with 45 stores of its own, Zeeman bought the chain of the textile retailer Loek Brons and became the largest textile discounter in the Netherlands.

The first German store opened in 1981, the same year the head office and warehouse moved to their present site on De Schans in Alphen aan den Rijn. The company presented its 250th store to the press in 1986, bought the 30 stores of Turkenburg in 1990 and opened its first stores in France in 1991. In Germany it took over the 52 stores of Wahler in 1995.

Succession and international growth (1998–2017)

Jan Zeeman handed day-to-day management to Paul Schouwenaar, a former director of Kijkshop, and stepped down as chairman of the executive board in 1999. The company then had 530 stores, about half of them acquired and half opened by Zeeman itself, and its distribution centre in Alphen aan den Rijn was expanded to 40,000 square metres (430,000 sq ft), enough to supply 1,500 stores. In the same year the store property was sold and leased back. Zeeman used the proceeds to set up the investment company Navitas Capital and the property company Green Real Estate, and remained on the supervisory board of the Zeeman Group until 2014.

The company bought the 100 branches of the Cologne retailer Urban-Textil-Handel in 2003, when it also opened its first stores in Luxembourg. Bart Karis became chief executive in January 2007. Zeeman published its first corporate social responsibility report in 2008, opened a larger "Zeeman XL" format in Roeselare, Belgium, in 2011, bought the 38 stores of Hans Textiel in the same year, and started selling online in the Netherlands in 2012. According to the company, its first stores in Austria and Spain opened in 2015. By 2016 it had 1,285 stores in seven countries and more than 7,000 employees, 92 per cent of them women.

The chain celebrated its fiftieth anniversary on 16 March 2017. Karis left at the end of that year; by then the company had about 1,290 stores, 750 of them outside the Netherlands. His successor, Erik-Jan Mares, had previously worked for Nutricia, C1000 and Ahold; he joined Zeeman in October 2017 and became CEO in 2018.

Under Erik-Jan Mares (2018–2026)

Zeeman opened its 1,300th store, in Valencia, in November 2018. For 2018 it reported revenue of about €609 million, more than 62 per cent of it from outside the Netherlands, and a net profit of just over €13 million. In 2019 Mares said the Dutch network would be cut from 505 stores to between 430 and 440, as the company left places with fewer than 7,500 inhabitants and looked to online sales for growth at home; Spain, with 47 stores at the time, was expected to take more than 200. Jan Zeeman died on 2 June 2020, aged 78.

The company opened its 100th Spanish and 300th French store in 2021 and had web shops in seven countries by 2022. In 2022 it was named Retailer of the Year in the ABN AMRO retail awards, and Mares was named Retail Executive of the Year. Its first store in Portugal, its eighth country, opened in Matosinhos near Porto on 26 April 2023.

Stores and products

Zeeman's range is built around four core groups: baby and children's clothing, legwear, household textiles, and underwear and nightwear. It also sells women's and men's clothing and a changing selection of non-textile goods such as food and cleaning products. The permanent range accounted for about a fifth of product lines but some 40 per cent of sales in 2021. Jan Zeeman argued that his underpants were as good in use as a branded pair costing more than three times as much, and the chain sold about 3.5 million pairs a year. In 2025 the company enlarged its range of second-hand clothing.

The stores are decorated in the company's yellow and blue, and its logo shows a young sailor (zeeman is Dutch for "seaman"). In 2021 most stores used a format with a yellow hanging sign bearing blue lettering above each department, and the rest an older version with a blue sign. That year Zeeman tested a new design in four stores, beginning in Ermelo, with warmer lighting, white fixtures, the permanent range along the walls, and bins, rails and shelves for changing promotions. The company builds or refits about a hundred stores a year.

Marketing

Several of Zeeman's campaigns have compared its products with expensive equivalents. In July 2011 it showed a collection at Amsterdam Fashion Week under the invented upmarket label "Frank" and revealed its own name at the end of the show. The organisers had accepted the designs, although one of the event's owners later said that commercial labels could simply buy a show. In February 2016 it sold a wedding dress of its own design for €29.99. Of the 1,500 made, the first 400 sold out within a morning, and some buyers offered theirs on Marktplaats before they had been delivered. In 2020 its perfume Lucht ("Air"), priced at €4.99 and presented as proof that most of the price of perfume pays for marketing, sold out within hours, and bottles were resold online for up to about €65.

In 2018 the agency Persuade won a gold Effie in the Netherlands for a Zeeman campaign telling the story behind the chain's bargains. A 2025 campaign offering a laboratory-grown diamond on a pendant for €29.99, under the slogan "Diamonds are for Everyone", compared it with similar pieces costing more than €300 at jewellers. The jeweller Gisser started summary proceedings, demanding a correction and an apology to the trade; according to Gisser, Zeeman removed the comparison from the campaign.