It’s been a while since Ruth Hulin was standing on that fence and making a video. Sometimes you have to capture moments to understand them and, more importantly, to preserve them. Her video shows the moment the excavators cleared the site in which she had worked for twenty years: the Sennheiser plant in Burgdorf. For Ruth and her colleagues, it was the end of an era. A really great era.
“We were a very tight-knit group. Many of my colleagues also became very good friends. We had a lot of fun at work. Of course we still have fun—and we are still working together. But the group simply wouldn’t have been the same had it not been for the plant in Burgdorf.” Yet we always knew that Burgdorf would close sooner or later and around 190 employees would move to Wennebostel. Ruth remembers it well: “We were shown the plans for the new production building in Wedemark. There was still plenty of room for expansion on the neighboring fields. We knew then that it would eventually become our new home.”
Perhaps it is thanks to Ruth’s resourcefulness and flexibility that she didn’t mope about for long. When she started working in production 30 years ago, everyone soon discovered her talent for design. “I gave my colleagues drawings of their pets,” says Ruth, laughing. “Then my boss came up with the idea that I could design and oversee the packaging labels.” Ruth also regularly captured images of the team with her camera. “We would meet during our break for a quick group photo in the entrance area.” Her pictures show how the team developed over time (and inadvertently how they gradually grew older side by side).
The Sennheiser team still benefits from one of her ideas. As a horse fanatic, she was attending a horse show when the idea came to her: Wow, they could really do with a compact sound system here. A system that you could take with you to celebrations and events. It would also be a bit of extra advertising for our company. She presented the idea to the board and was given the green light. Today, Sennheiser employees can borrow the sound system for celebrations and events of all kinds to ensure their party hits the perfect note. Most of them don’t even realize that they have Ruth Hulin to thank for this.
Ruth and her colleagues from Burgdorf have been in their new jobs in Wedemark for 10 years now. Whenever there’s a company party, the colleagues can always be found together having a great time. The fact that they automatically seek each other out, even though they have been working in different teams for years, shows how strong their bond remains. Or as Ruth would say: “We have something unique. There will simply never be another group like us.”