The Mexx Group: Textbook Innovation at Work

Abstract

The Corporate Design headquarters of the Mexx Group, situated in a quiet suburb of The Hague, recently won a prize as one of the seven most innovative buildings in the world. From the outside, it is an attractive nineteenth-century grey and white building set in wooded grounds; on the inside, it is a spacious, post-modernist structure in which a visitor is immediately struck by its luxury. It is an office complex more in line with what one would expect from a prestigious advertising agency rather than a clothes designer/wholesaler. Yet, this building, in combining a sense of order and structure together with creativity, succeeds in symbolising not only the success of the Mexx Group, but also its management philosophy. Though not without its share of problems, the Mexx Group is, by most standards, a success story.