The Munich basketball specialist has a new general manager who spent 2019-2020 managing Nike’s own Kickz account, then joined Zalando, the platform that owned Kickz until that year, for five years in partnerships.
Marijn van Dommelen has become general manager of Kickz.com GmbH, the Munich-based basketball and streetwear retailer, effective Aug. 1.
The appointment closes an unusual loop. Van Dommelen arrives from Zalando, where his final assignment centered on partnership work after five years that included both brand-facing and retail-facing responsibilities. Zalando itself owned Kickz between 2017 and 2019, before selling the retailer to Play Hard, a subsidiary of German start-up incubator Crealize. Kickz then passed to 11teamsports in July 2023, part of that team sports group’s push to broaden its performance category beyond amateur team sports.
Before Zalando, Van Dommelen spent over five years with Nike, where his focus fell on major digital retail accounts and building out marketplace operations across Europe. His LinkedIn career history lists a 2019-2020 stint as Nike’s EMEA key account manager for the Kickz account itself, putting him on the brand’s side of the Nike-Kickz relationship a decade before taking the retailer’s top job.
Van Dommelen has spent his opening weeks touring Kickz stores and meeting the retailer’s brand and trade partners, framing the assignment as extending the business’s basketball roots rather than overhauling them.
About Kickz.com GmbH: Kickz is a Munich-based specialist retailer for basketball gear, premium sneakers and streetwear, founded in 1993. It operates five stores in Berlin, Hamburg and Munich alongside an e-commerce platform, and has been part of the 11teamsports Group, a European team sports retailer and distributor headquartered in Satteldorf, Germany, since July 2023.
