Historical Background
When Heinz Roethlisberger founded the distribution company, Polydono, on July 1, 1979 in Bern and started up business in the summer of 1980, the foundation site must have already been a good omen: Roethlisberger’s company Polydono took up residence in exactly the same house that the young Gottlieb Duttweiler had used 55 years previously when he founded Migros, today a giant Swiss retailer – and Polydono is still there today. From the original product range of between 50 and 80 items, the fi rm has developed into one of the largest Swiss promotional products distributors and in the meantime the programme includes 25,000 products. Polydono fi lls the building at 34 Weyermannstreet up to the very last corner: 400 m? of warehouse space, a 150 m? showroom, 150 m? of offi ces and a 200 m? sized samples warehouse are spread over several fl oors in the rambling old house in the city of Bern.

A family business – both of Heinz Roethlisberger’s sons, Alex and Frank, have long since started taking on responsibility – Polydono is meanwhile economically stable, even if several diffi culties had to be overcome in the initial years. Similar to the former tenant Migros, Polydono grew very fast at the beginning of the eighties and soon had 45 employees on the salary list. All of the individual services were taken care of internally: Warehousing, packaging, dispatch, etc. “This was far too unprofi table, so we gradually had to outsource certain operations,“ remembers Heinz Roethlisberger.