Sports goods expert Jürgen Pankonin (born in 1952) founded the company sport promotion service j.pankonin gmbh in 1986 with the tagline ‘Sports and leisure collection for advertising, sales and sales promotion’. The big topic of ‘merchandising’ was born. The company specialised in ‘fashionable trends and corporate identity’, using the help of permanently employed professional fashion designers to create attractive, first-class, high-selling items (clothing and accessories). The company developed rapidly. After a few years, its customer list read like a who’s who of the German economy.

Highlights such as the ‘Krombacher Formula 1 Collection’ (1998), the ‘Bitburger Olympic Collection’ (2002) and the Aspire Sports Collection (2006) each generated order values of over 1 million euros (German marks). In the 1990s, almost all Bundesliga football clubs were part of the company’s regular customer base. In the mid-1990s, Jürgen Pankonin developed one of the first merchandising collections exclusively for women with FC Bayern Munich.Pankonin’s customers from the automotive industry (AMG/Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Citroën, Opel, Land Rover, Peugeot, VW) established their own profit centres for merchandising in order to market their individually and exclusively developed products worldwide. In this context, the market for corporate wear also took off. Today, companies such as Deutsche Post DHL (DPDHL), OBI, Rossmann and Jägermeister are among its regular customers. In 2018, the company changed its name to ‘PANKONIN CORPORATE WEAR GmbH’.

An important part of the company’s success was the excellent relationships that Jürgen Pankonin built up with high-performance manufacturers in Turkey, Hong Kong, China, Bangladesh and India. Over the past 35 years, Jürgen Pankonin has made more than 200 trips to these countries to build trust with production partners and monitor product quality.

In 2021, Jürgen Pankonin sold 80% of his shares in the company to FL Textil GmbH, Vienna, and transferred 20% of his shares to his son Florian Pankonin, who joined the company in 2009 and was appointed as an additional managing director in 2018. Florian Pankonin is now the managing director of PANKONIN CORPORATE WEAR GmbH.

Following the expiry of his two-year consultancy contract and a two-year break, Jürgen Pankonin has now founded PANKO Consulting in order to make his comprehensive expertise available to interested companies.