How To Maintain Culture In A Scale-Up?

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Keeping culture alive in a fast-growing company isn’t just a challenge – it’s a responsibility. Because when you go from being a small team to a more complex structure, with stores in different cities (25 in our case), new profiles, and more formal processes, culture – that thing that felt so organic at the beginning – starts to require structure, intention, and a lot of care.

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In my experience, the first thing I learned is that culture isn’t sustained by nice phrases or a mural on the office wall, but by consistency. And that consistency needs to be visible in every corner of the company: from how you hire to how you give feedback, from how you define benefits to how you support someone having a tough week. If your brand says one thing and your team experiences another, everything falls apart.

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At Blue Banana, we’ve tried to ensure that our value proposition as a brand is 100% aligned with the experience we offer to the people on our team. If we talk about adventure and an active lifestyle, we try to make that tangible in day-to-day life. We have a running club for anyone who wants to run together after work, we offer access to Gympass, and there are always healthy food options in the office. It’s not about adding perks; it’s about backing up what we say we are with real actions.

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We also understood early on that culture transforms, and what worked for 15 people doesn’t necessarily work for 200. That’s why we listen. We run engagement surveys, have open communication channels, hold sessions where anyone can propose improvements… and, most importantly, we act on what the team shares.

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My advice for someone at this stage?

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Think of culture as another of your company’s products. Take care of it, review it, adapt it. Be consistent. Involve the people who best represent it. And make sure to clearly define what is acceptable and what isn’t, even when it’s not the easiest path. Because culture isn’t what you say. It’s what you do.

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