64
complete. With the design of this massive
project, temporarily laid-off employees
were called back in, and the company
hoped to return to full employment by April
2009.
To expand and strengthen its own
concept and basic design capacity,
Deltamarin established a new office in
Gdynia, Poland where capacity was
available, engineering education was
of high standard and engineers highly
qualified.
Jadwiga Sztelwander-Zieba, General
Manager of Deltamarin Sp. z o.o.,
reminisces about the beginning: “My own
life adventure connected with building
the design office from scratch started in
October 2008. And I always say that it
was difficult to find a worse time to start
with that kind of an idea, just a few weeks
after the big financial crisis erupted. The
nice plan for building the branch office to
only take care of delivering capacity to the
parent company had to be immediately
revised and we had to fight for own clients
from the very first months of our activity.”
“We started with just three people
in Gdynia. As the company grew and
more designers were hired, the company
was relocated to Gdansk and gradually
turned into a typical design office with
departments of different disciplines. In
2013, we faced the necessity of making
a strategic decision – should we remain
a small design office supported by other
companies if needed, or should we grow
our own capacity to fight for the position of
a self-sufficient maritime design office with
all design skills in-house. Together with our
parent company, we decided to follow the
growth path. Since then we have sometimes
been working on very big projects with a
large number of designers involved (our
records show approx. 150 designers as its
peak), sometimes with smaller projects,
but constantly growing and developing our
own core staff. Currently we have above 70
employees and a large network of smaller
companies and freelancers supporting us if
needed.”
“Looking at where we are now, I am
proud and grateful for the effort of all our
employees who joined us on this journey,
and were the real authors of our success.”
Jadwiga Sztelwander-
Zieba, General Manager
of Deltamarin Sp. z o.o.
HIGHS AND LOWS