Internship at HEfitness

Hi, I'm Joeri Hazenberg, and I was an intern at HEfitness for 3 months.

Read on to learn about my internship experience, what I did and what I thought of it.

First, a bit about myself: I am in my final year of my education. I study international business at Alfa College, I'm 19 years old and I'm from the Netherlands.
I came across this company through an intermediary agency, which helped me find companies abroad for my internship. They presented me with several companies to choose from, including HEfitness. I wrote a motivation letter for one company and had a Zoom meeting with a few, including HEfitness. During the Zoom meeting, they told me a bit about the company, what I could expect to do. Where HEfitness stood out was that they are a smaller company and they were happy to help me finding a suitable accommodation, as their sister has a large house where she rents out rooms. Fortunately, there was a room available for me to use. During my internship, I lived with five other people in a house. I never really found this to be a problem because they were all very nice. The only downside was that not all of them spoke English, which could sometimes be a challenge. I chose HEfitness because it's a smaller company, employing three people. I liked this because my experience so far has shown that you learn less at larger companies where you are assigned to a department and only work there. At smaller companies, you get involved in everything, and in my opinion you learn a lot more. Another big advantage was their help in finding housing. I had looked around a bit but couldn't find a suitable place for a reasonable price, but they helped me greatly with this.

What I did:
During my internship I did many different things, especially things I wanted to learn more about. I appreciated that they asked nearly every week if there was anything special I wanted to learn or was particularly interested in doing. I wanted to learn a bit of everything; I was involved in designing their website, I helped think up and create videos for social media, and much more which I will detail further. I also wanted to learn about their advertising and marketing, so I spent a lot of time working on their Google Ads and trying to optimize them, as well as creating various Blocket ads. I was also involved with their website and the creation and improvement of new products by changing the text or photos. I also helped develop a new category called "Butik Sthlm" on their website, which we created so customers can see what's available in the store and then come and pick up the products. I played a major role in adding and organizing all the products. What I also did was ensure the correct entry of quantities and storage locations of products in the warehouse, someone else had counted all the products in their warehouse but had not yet entered them online. But after that was done, we could easily see if customers came into the store wanting to buy something, how much we have and where it's located. I also helped rearrange the store layout. We moved many things down to the warehouse to make it look calmer and cleaner when customers enter. Occasionally, I also delivered orders around Stockholm, which was great as it allowed me to see other parts of Stockholm that you wouldn't normally visit. I also learned more about how they used to import many products from China, and what all is involved in importing products from there.

My experience at HEfitness:
I was an intern here for three months and really enjoyed it. I learned a lot and did fun things. It was very educational because they were eager to explain things to me and teach me new things. What I also really liked was that it didn’t feel like you were just an intern, it felt like you were a regular employee, you didn't just get the unpleasant assignments and jobs or had do things other than what you agreed to. They regularly asked what I would like to learn more about or if there was something special I wanted to do. I really enjoyed it and would recommend anyone to have there internship here, it’s a wonderful experience.

We also did an interview at the beginning of my internship about me and how I became a part of their company. Feel free to watch that video and a few others to get an idea of what it's like here.