History

Sporting goods expert Jürgen Pankonin (born in 1952) founded the company sport promotion service j.pankonin gmbh in 1986, with the additional description “Sports and leisure collections for advertising, sales and sales promotion.” The major concept of “merchandising” was born.

The company’s speciality was to combine “fashionable relevance and corporate identity” with the expertise of permanently employed professional fashion designers to create attractive, first-class and high-selling products such as clothing and accessories. The company developed rapidly. Within just a few years, its client list read like a who’s who of German industry.
Highlights such as the “Krombacher Formula 1 Collection” (1998), the “Bitburger Olympic Collection” (2002) and the Aspire Sports Collection (2006) each generated orders worth more than one million euros or Deutsche Marks. In the 1990s, nearly all German Bundesliga football clubs were regular clients. In the mid-1990s, Jürgen Pankonin worked with FC Bayern Munich to develop one of the first merchandising collections exclusively for women.

Pankonin’s clients in the automotive industry (AMG/Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Citroën, Opel, Land Rover, Peugeot and VW) established their own merchandising profit centres to market the individually and exclusively developed products worldwide. In this context, the market for employee clothing (corporate wear) also began to gain momentum. Today, major companies such as Deutsche Post DHL (DPDHL), OBI, Rossmann and Jägermeister are among the company’s regular clients.

In 2018, the company changed its name to “PANKONIN CORPORATE WEAR GmbH.“

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

In 2021, Jürgen Pankonin sold eighty percent of his shares in the company to FL Textil GmbH in Vienna and transferred the remaining twenty percent to his son Florian Pankonin, who had joined the company in 2009 and was appointed as an additional managing director in 2018. Today, Florian Pankonin serves as Managing Director of PANKONIN CORPORATE WEAR GmbH.
After the conclusion of his two-year consultancy agreement, Jürgen Pankonin founded PANKO Consulting to make his extensive expertise available to interested companies.