It was April 1989 when I arrived on earth. Fortunately landing city was Istanbul; one of the most beautiful places one can born in. Spent more than half of my life around Gayrettepe, a central district in Istanbul, where I spent the late afternoons playing soccer at the car park with my friends. A bit after that, I obtained my BA in Business Administration from Koç University, a non-profit private college and an amazing education park with a great campus inside northern Istanbul forests.
Freshly out of college, I started managing Saatturk, one of the very first online watch retailers in Turkey. Before I took over, the company was selling watches of Turkish distributors, without any exclusivity rights. I introduced ZIIIRO and 666Barcelona to the market by getting their exclusivity rights for Turkey. Now the company has these rights for more than 10 different brands. Thinking of learning a second foreign language and having an experience of living abroad, on September 2012, I relocated to Beijing, China. Studied Chinese language in one of the top universities in China; Tsinghua University. Having spent a year over there, I moved to Tainan City of Taiwan to explore a similar, but also different Asian culture. I kept studying Chinese, but also worked as an international sales manager in a Taiwanese plastic stationery goods machinery manufacturer. After almost a year in Taiwan, my new spot was Shanghai. I pursued my MBA in China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), and spent two spectacular years in this amazing city. I made loads of life-long friends, learned tons of stuff in terms of business. Enlarged vision. Big time.
After four years in Asia, I came back to Turkey to take a bigger step towards my goal of establishing a global conglomerate that will produce more than economic outcomes; an organization that will create value by making social impacts on peoples lives, especially in Turkey. I worked as a Deputy Director in one of the large Turkish group of companies, which is serving local and global markets in office equipments, digital textile, packaging, and watch industries for close to 4 years.
In 2019, right before pandemic hit, I moved to United States to start a completely new life. Full transparency, moving to the US, let alone living in a different country for the third time was nowhere near my agenda, though the opportunity came at a very interesting time that I had no better option but to take it. It was just a “alright, time for another adventure, here we go” sort of feeling. Long story short, here I am, having lived over two years, working for one of the greatest companies of all times as a Program Manager. All things aside, I’m enjoying this ride of extreme learning experience to its best.
Here in this humble blog, I’m trying to share interesting stuff from my life.
Hope y’all will enjoy!
Berkay