Sytske Hermans
PR & Marketing / Office manager
I live in a nice apartment in Amsterdam, together with hubbie Alwin and our cats Bowser and Yoshi (yes, the Nintendo link). Everyday we cycle to the office crossing the Vondelpark which is always a pleasure ride: quiet and cold in wintertime, 24 hours activity during summer.
In my spare time I have to divide the hours between work & play: next to my work at Collectorz.com I have my own company. This is usually one day work which leaves time to do fun stuff: going to the gym, reading comics and books, driving to fun places (and go shopping!), watch DVDs and write little something's about my cats on their catlog. Alwin and I get the occasional brainwave in the weekend and if we come up with new ideas, we work a bit outside office hours. That's the beauty of having your own company: it never feels like work.
My Collection
Our home is spacious but filled with our collections: Alwin's video games, DVDs and CDs and my books and comics. My CDs are not worth mentioning and obviously Alwin and I watch the same DVDs. Read his bio for our taste in DVDs, I will tell you something about my albums (strips in Dutch) and books.When I was a little girl with pigtails, our family went on the annual summer vacation and my brothers and I always got one album each for the road. This was usually a Suske & Wiske, Asterix or a Kuifje (very popular series in Belgium and The Netherlands). I still have these, they are torn and in pieces but I can't part with them. This formed the basis of my collection although I didn't know then that it was going to become one.
In high school I met my paper hero Johan De Rode Ridder (Johan the Red Knight) and his adventures started my collection. Nothing beats a rainy day curled up on the sofa with a nice hot pot of tea and reading my Rode Ridders. I made it my quest to buy all albums and have the series complete: the old black and white albums, in red and blue inking and the new colored ones.
My comic collection is not humongous but a nice one: Asterix, Blake & Mortimer, Largo Winch, Storm, Thorgal, XIII and Yoko Tsuno, just to name some of them. I have added all albums to Comic Collector and never go shopping without my iPod. It's so darn easy to browse my collection in the shop and avoid duplicates (or triplets, I must confess buying one album three times).
I buy a lot of books but not because I collect them, I just happen to be a fast reader. Thrillers, fantasy, science fiction and crime novels are my favorites. My short list: Discworld (Terry Pratchett), The Sword of Truth (Terry Goodkind), all books by Trudi Canavan, P.D. James, Karin Slaughter, P.J. Tracy and Dean Koontz.
At Collectorz.com
Before I started working here in August 2005 I used to work in Marketing & PR at other companies. Of course I knew all ins & outs of Bitz & Pixelz from the start because Alwin always talked about his work at home. When opportunity knocked I answered.During my first months at Collectorz.com I started working on the new online movie database. That was a huge project which took all of my time. This part of the job stopped when we hired our movie database admins; it was time for me to move on. Enter new projects like starting a monthly newsletter, new website texts, searching for new marketing channels and the start of the online music database. Never a dull moment, we continue to improve our software and products.
My focus now is on marketing & PR, but since we're a small team I also do HR, Finance, be Alwin's PA and do the lunch & office shopping. Rest assured that you can leave the shopping to me!