How we areun­like oth­er pub­lish­ers

Our products are take-away items and are mostly sold on the special offer shelves of food retailers, on special bookshop counters or online. Due to these challenging sales channels, we must always act pragmatically and "hands on” and keep an eye on the entire chain from product development to the point of sale. We see this as a special challenge every day, because it is the only way to reach people who might not otherwise buy books. We find this fulfilling and meaningful.

NGV, VEMAG’s first publishing house, was born from the idea of publishing and distributing inexpensive yet high-quality books for every household. And “every household" is to be taken quite literally. Our first titles included a Bible and an "essen&trinken” cookery book - real bestsellers in their day. Today, PAW Patrol colouring books and scratch & relax titles are among our bestsellers. The needs of our customers determine the design of our product range. That’s why books from our children’s book publisher Schwager & Steinlein, for example, can be found in almost every child’s bedroom.

This extraordinary reach and the very high print runs associated with it are an incentive and motivation for us.

We are proud of our company location, because Cologne stands for everything that is also important to us in the company: openness and tolerance, humour and dat Hätz  in the right place - and every now and then a glass of Kölsch after work. Our personal additions to Cologne's constitution are our efficiency, our openness to innovation and, above all, our unconditional will to do business successfully.

These characteristics have led to the fact that we, as a publishing group, are probably really different from “traditional publishers” (which, by the way, we greatly appreciate). We work on the basis of a thoroughly documented process management system that was introduced several years ago: this is the only way we can achieve just-in-time production in large quantities, in many languages, time and time again. Speaking of languages: we produce all foreign editions of our titles ourselves - at the same time as the German editions. And the lorries that transport our books from the overseas ports or from the European printing plants to our international trading partners are managed by our own logistics agency VIP. From Cologne to the world, that is our mission.

The business of business is business? Yes, but not only! One of our firm convictions is that economically successful work must always include responsible behaviour towards each individual, society and the climate. We are therefore endeavouring to become better and better in these key areas:

• Climate: in our Group-wide sustainability initiative vemag_sustain, we are continuously working to ensure that our books consume fewer resources.
• People: we have a progressive, family-friendly working time organisation with a high proportion of working from home, the opportunity to work longer hours and popular corporate benefits.
• Transparency: an employee blog and popular meeting formats developed by employees are available for the all-important internal company communication.

We regularly put all of this to the test - maybe we’ll come up with something even better tomorrow?