Sönke Padberg has taken over the position of BTE Managing Director at the BTE Textile Shoes Leather Goods Trade Association. He succeeds Axel Augustin, who is ending his work at BTE after almost 35 years.
Padberg has been a member of the BTE team as a speaker since February. He has many years of professional and management experience in the stationary shoe trade and in the area of association groups. He ran his parents’ shoe and sports chain store of the same name in the Ruhr area/Münsterland and acted as a long-standing junior spokesman for the ANWR group. Positions as retail manager at Tamaris, Lloyd, Mephisto and in real estate development followed. Most recently, Padberg worked as a senior consultant for restructuring, M&A and strategy development at the management consultancy Fashionconsult.
The tasks in his new position include the observation, analysis and evaluation of important (legislative) processes and topics relevant to the fashion trade, business administration and advising fashion and shoe retail companies. He will manage the association from the new BTE location in Berlin, where it will relocate in mid-2025.
The previous managing director Axel Augustin cites “primarily private reasons” for his resignation in his LinkedIn profile. These include, for example, inadequate rail connections from his hometown to Berlin. However, he will not say goodbye to the fashion industry or BTE completely: from 2026 he will be editor-in-chief of the BTE magazine “Marketing Consultant” and responsible for BTE events such as the BTE Digital Day, the BTE Congress and the BTE webinars. His position as managing director of the Cologne VDB Association of Bed Specialist Stores also remains.