2 minute read
Introduction
10 years of growing, innovating and having fun
10 years and 135 employees later, we can look back on a success story that still has so much in store for the future.
ION celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2021! Our strength? We always look towards the future. Although we have had many successes in recent years, we have never dwelt on them for too long. We always believe that we can do better and be more ambitious and effective. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have fun. Quite the contrary, fun is in our DNA! Fun is a recurring theme in our way of working. We firmly believe that it's the reason why our trajectory flows naturally and efficiently.
Another reason are the 135 talented people who work hard every day to achieve our successes and continue to grow with our company. We have welcomed a lot of new talent in the past year. Our Finance, HR, and Marketing Departments needed three new directors to help us take our company to the next level. And we found them: Florence, Geert, and Virginie are the perfect match for ION. They will take you through an engaging conversation where they talk about the strengths of their team and their role as directors. — Challenges We have experienced a lot of turmoil over the years, and this will be no different in the next ten years. The current hot topic is undoubtedly the issue of affordable living. We are constantly considering and experimenting with ways of offering solutions to this problem to young and not-so-young people. One of these solutions is IRP, our institutional housing platform. The purpose of this platform is to invest in affordable and good quality rented homes in Belgium’s largest cities. Another one is sharing communal areas with attention to housing quality. Of course, we are also looking at our neighboring countries, where this problem has been around for much longer. It continues to be a search that we are intensely engaged in.
The next topic that we cannot ignore today is sustainability. We are proud of everything that we have achieved. Our head office was Belgium’s first carbon-neutral office building, and in Veurne, we are building the first heat network that uses the industrial residual heat from PepsiCo’s chip oven for sustainable home heating. We believe that things can always be better, so we are constantly analyzing and thinking. What else can we do? On an ecological level but also on a financial and social level. You can read more about our sustainable initiatives in this magazine. — Sharing our views The great thing about ICONIC is the variety of themes that are covered. We intend to bring you a unique magazine. One that looks good and in which we can share our views from different perspectives: from art to technology and from law to architecture. We enjoy inspiring and provoking our readers to think. The new “Spotted by ION” section is an excellent and light-hearted example of this.
We sincerely hope that you can relate to some of the topics and will enjoy learning from the articles in this magazine. Enjoy!
Davy Demuynck and Kristof Vanfleteren
CEO’s and co-founders
