Welcome to Behind the Thinking - the series where we introduce the people behind Commerce Thinking and the journeys that brought them here.
This time, we’re featuring Maxime Ossieur. Maxime is someone who’s experienced both sides of commerce: the warehouse floors where stock meets reality, and the system flows that keep operations moving.
His route runs from a student start-up and a crash course in seasonality to a 3PL traineeship that began on the warehouse floor. He learned operations from the ground up, moved into IT project management, and later led the systems function at one of the UK’s fastest-growing brands before joining Commerce Thinking.
He’s at his best where operations meet systems, working with teams on the ground to turn moving parts into a flow that actually works.
“I wanted to build things” - but I learned to start with the process.
Born in Ghent, Maxime began university in 2008 to study civil engineering, following his childhood dream of building “big projects”. Year one was a hard stop:
“I realised pretty quickly that civil engineering was for the maths geniuses - and I wasn’t one of them.”
He switched to business engineering - a five-year degree with more economics and less physics - and caught the bug for building something of his own. With two friends, he launched a ski-wear rental start-up: a WooCommerce site, some discounted stock, and a small warehouse that filled up fast.
Some hard lessons were learned early. They spent their cash on inventory and left little for marketing. Maxime cold-called hundreds of schools to pitch ski-trip rentals and presented at parents’ evenings to generate bookings, but the model was brutally seasonal. Once Maxime graduated, he lost the student safety net, and the social security bills started arriving.
“We’d put all our savings into stock. Then suddenly I had to pay bills and had no income.”
He needed a job, and the one he found would unexpectedly lead him into systems.
From scanners and clock-ins to integrations and go-lives
Maxime joined a major Belgian third-party logistics provider on a management traineeship. He started intentionally at the bottom: picking, packing, scanning, managing team clock-ins and tracking time-on-job. Learning the process before proposing changes was important to him.
“If you don’t understand the processes inside your company, it’s very hard to implement any meaningful change.”
After a year, that mindset pulled him into IT project management: onboarding new clients, aligning integrations and configuring the warehouse management system with customers’ tech teams.
In 2017, one client onboarding call changed the arc: Gymshark was moving to a new Distribution Centre in Swindon. Maxime joined the Gymshark onboarding project, working across discovery, integrations, and go-live. He then spent January–July 2018 on site in the UK to steady the operation and optimise it.
“We went from an empty building to a live distribution centre, then from a messy operation to something that worked.”
Gymshark was impressed. In May 2018, they brought him in to talk “back-office tech” — and offered him the role. By October, he’d joined as Head of Systems after helping open a second Gymshark DC in Belgium.
Head of Systems: building, scaling, and the limits of management
The first months at Gymshark were a sprint: NetSuite was fresh out of implementation, the team was still taking shape, and Black Friday was fast approaching. Maxime got up to speed fast - training, getting deep into the systems landscape and working closely with integration partners to scale for peak and fix legacy issues.
Over the next few years, he grew the systems function: adding sysadmins, project managers, an engineering track, and building a team that expanded from a small nucleus to around 12 people.
COVID shifted everything again. Maxime moved back to Belgium, managed the UK-centred estate remotely and kept flying in as needed.
The shift brought its own friction:
“I started to lose touch with the detail and the actual projects. You get credit as a manager for the team’s work, but I didn’t feel like I was having the impact myself.”
By 2022, Maxime had moved into a newly created enterprise architecture role, which was broad in scope but light on direction. He found himself increasingly removed from the hands-on work he enjoyed. The disconnect grew. Trusted colleagues moved on. Maxime knew it was time.
Joining Commerce Thinking: back to impact
Conversations with Luke Hodgson, one of the co-founders of Commerce Thinking, began while Maxime was still in-house. He pressed pause to take parental leave and, in 2023, made the jump. A short spell trying to balance his own pipeline with CT projects confirmed what he already suspected: he wanted hands-on projects - building, fixing, and implementing - rather than sales development. By November 2023, he was full-time at Commerce Thinking.
Since then: Liverpool FC, LFDY, Little Sleepies, Nobody’s Child and several smaller pieces in between.
“It’s been amazing working with a small team again where you have a lot of impact. It matters what you do.”
What Maxime brings that’s different
Rooted in operations, fluent in systems. Maxime’s done the scanners, rosters, and stock moves, and then built the systems that make them work.
Calm at go-live. When pressure builds, he focuses on what’s slowing things down and prioritises fixes properly.
Hands-on leadership. He can build teams, but his edge is delivery and staying close to the work where outcomes are shaped.
Process-driven. If it doesn’t make sense, he challenges it. If testing is weak, he strengthens it. If seasonality drives the business, he designs for it.
Maxime’s advice for emerging operators
Say yes before you feel “ready”.
Steve Hewitt, Gymshark used to say: “Be comfortable being uncomfortable” and that moved me forward the most. The learning comes after you commit.
Start at the process - experience every step of the process and understand it before you try to fix it.
Be a critical mind - challenge assumptions. If you’re wrong, you’ll learn why. If you’re right, you’ll improve the system.
Degrees open doors; delivery builds careers - a diploma gets you in the conversation. Impact keeps you there.
Know your fit - if you love detail and change, project work and consultancy may suit you more than people management.
Outside the office
Life is anchored in Belgium with Sarah and their son. Summers are split between the Belgian coast and family time in France. Spare hours go to padel, football, and occasionally planning the next trip.
What’s next
More of what works: strengthening fragile flows, building integrations that last, and helping brands go live smoothly - whether that’s a new distribution centre, a store launch, or ERP changes that need to work from day one.
If your operations are growing faster than your systems, Maxime’s the person who’ll steady the setup, ideally hands-on and in situ, making sure everything runs as it should.