BELONG To People

Feeling the responsibility

• CAREER
• GROWTH
• TRAINING

Inside a container at the port of Shanghai. The task is to check the compliance of dozens of thousands garments ready to be sold on the market. Rubens Bucci, together with some Italian colleagues and a team of local collaborators, examines them, measures them, wears them as it requires the Quality Control procedure. However, his work is not limited to it. He also assesses the work of the others and together with someone else he supervises their performance. He might seem a true expert, but he is actually not. He has been working at Teddy only for a month. He signed his contract in April 2004 and, like many others, he started his training period working as a sales associate in the Terranova store in Pesaro. A period that should have lasted 40 days but which was interrupted earlier because Ruben’s will to go beyond ordinary tasks was far greater. He had the chance to be informed by some colleagues that a mission to China was being organized, so he asked to join it. And that’s how he ended there. His Teddy adventure was set to begin with a business trip to the other side of the world. A flying debut that maybe can happen only in an original company just like Teddy is. 

“I left Italy with a dozens of people and at the beginning we had only to stay for a month to be later replaced by another team”. However, things took an unexpected turn. “The company decided that the second group coming from Italy should not leave and asked us to stay instead. Someone else and I accepted and as I had done a good job and showed myself proactive, the company entrusted me with part of the management and team coordination. I did not expect it because it was an important job: manufacturing in the Far East had been started not long before and there were still many critical issues to work on and to be improved, but above all there were dozens of thousands of clothing items to be checked”. When being faced with so many unknowns, someone might have cold feet and give up. But that was not Ruben’s case. He has always loved rolling up his sleeves and, far more than a quiet life, he likes feeling the thrill of fear and pleasure combined, coming from taking on responsibilities. Just like any good lad born in Rimini Riviera he had worked every summer as a bartender during his university years and even then, when he had the chance, he took some more risks when being promoted as head bartender and supply manager. He was good at mixing mojitos and caipiroskas (the golden age of gin tonic cocktails was still far away), but ordinary tasks were not enough for him. He wanted something more. 

After his business stay in China, which ideally was considered as a training period, Rubens went on travelling for business supervising stores as an Area Manager. With a van full of good he travelled up and down Italy, often with stopovers in Sicily. “I was in charge of verifying the visual and sales strategies implemented in our points of sale, even though I did not have the full training and skills to do it. It was a nice period because I met so many people, but it was also difficult because it was hard being away from home and from my family”. To add to this, he felt a bit limited in that job: it was not what he expected when he joined Teddy. “During my university years I sometimes collaborated as a fashion model to check the wearability of clothes and sensed that behind the product I had always experienced as a consumer there was a world ready to be discovered. I wanted to work in that specific field”. In the end the work done over those months paid back and in January 2006 he entered Terranova Research Department to later become the head manager in a short time. From then onwards, it has been a never-ending succession of changes.

In 2008 he moved to work for Calliope, then back to Terranova to later move to work for Rinascimento, where he still is the Product Head Manager for the retail Division. With analyses, budgets and KPIs on the one side and fashion and trends on the other he found his dream job where the rational part of his soul perfectly meets with the creative one. “I owe a lot to Teddy, they have made me feel part of something important. Even though I was hard-wired for taking on responsibilities and found inside Teddy the perfect environment to grow, there is also an aspect I was able to develop working here. I was born as a not very talkative, quite reserved person, but inside Teddy I also learnt how to build relationships with people, how to make them give their best, how to discover their talents”.