Career paths: Alumna Darina Oumanski has founded her own company

She knew she wanted to start her own business someday when she was eleven years old. Back then, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Darina's father - a former officer in the Soviet army - suddenly started collecting old furniture from the scrap yard. He restored them and sold them for a profit on the open market. "My father is and always has been a very formative figure in my life," Darina Oumanski says today, more than 30 years later. "At some point he started to 'do everything himself,' was his own boss. That would have been completely unthinkable under communist rule and was absolutely revolutionary and impressive to me as a child."

She herself ventured out on her own in 2017. This step was not necessarily self-evident directly after she graduated with a bachelor's degree in International Retail Management in 2009. She had studied dual in cooperation with MediaMarkt-Saturn, initially working there as a team leader and then changing jobs every two to three years - always looking for new challenges. Finally, she founded her own company Never Alone Games UG in the e-sports industry, which was booming at the time. Since then, she has been developing ideas for established companies as well as for young start-ups, advising on marketing campaigns, fundraising or games development. Her clients include ZDF Enterprises and Kinguin, one of the largest gaming platforms on the Internet.

"I've always loved playing computer games, so it was obvious for me to specialize in this area," says Darina. Depending on her clients' budgets, she either works alone or brings a freelancer or two on board. This allows her to work with companies all over the world.

In her work, she also benefits significantly from the knowledge she acquired during her studies at THI Business School. For example, she dealt with neuro-marketing in her bachelor's thesis in 2009. "At that time, the whole topic had not been studied very intensively scientifically," Darina explains. "At its core, it's about exploring how and to which stimuli our brain reacts, for example, when we make a purchase decision." Today, twelve years later, many of the theories have been scientifically proven, and she can make the most of them in her consulting work.

Yet it was by no means a given that she would pass her studies. "I have to honestly confess that it was pretty darn close a couple of times," Darina admits with a laugh. "That was my own fault. I remember the day before the final exam in marketing, I didn't go to bed until 5 a.m. because I had been playing 'World of Warcraft' for way too long. The exam was at 9 o'clock. A disaster! I was also pregnant at the time ... Well, somehow it worked out anyway. By the skin of my teeth."

Darina is still connected to THI Business School in a special way today, as one of the 16 members of the Praxis Advisory Board, which was newly established in 2020. In this role, she supports the faculty with regular feedback, for example on strategic development.