Where our presents come from

Siyagona Fernando definitely doesn't need a smartwatch that counts her steps and encourages her to move more. She walks 16 kilometres a day at her place of work. The 33-year-old is employed as a picker in the Digitec Galaxus central warehouse; a huge complex in Wohlen in the canton of Aargau.

From the outside, the functional buildings look almost abandoned on this foggy December day. Yet it's all systems go behind the yellow-painted façade. As Switzerland's largest online retailer, Digitec Galaxus sends out tens of thousands of parcels a day in December.

A maze of shelves

Employees like Siyagona Fernando play a key role in this. She and her colleagues work in the "picktower"; a three-storey building with corridors stretching 100 metres. They walk quickly through the maze of shelves, guided by a mobile phone-like device called a Zebra. In this way, they immediately locate ordered products, which they scan and place in a trolley, before taking them to one of the conveyor belts that lead to the packing area. Each picker processes about 80 orders an hour.

That all sounds rather stressful. But Siyagona Fernando appears perfectly calm at work. "I'm a complete Christmas fan," she says. "And I think it's cool when I take more and more Christmas products off the shelves during Advent." Today, she is even wearing a bright red Christmas jumper under her fluorescent yellow vest.

Anyone who accompanies her on a tour of the picktower will soon discover the almost absurd variety of the Digitec-Galaxus range. For example, coffee capsules, energy drinks, aftershave, Advent calendars, Playmobil castles, joss sticks, fairy lights and angel hair all end up in trolleys.

One reason why Fernando appears so confident and calm at work is thanks to the organisational efforts of 30-year-old head picker Dominic Halbeis. "At a logistics centre, things shouldn't be more rushed on peak days than on other days," he points out. Halbeis says that what is crucial is that there are always enough logistics staff on hand. For this reason, 200 pickers work in two shifts throughout December. This compares to only about 100 on a typical day in January.

It's an entirely different world in the automated section of the central warehouse, right next door to the picktower. There, it's not people who dominate, but machines. Robotic arms place ordered goods in open miniature electric trolleys that autonomously whiz along special cordoned off lanes. Packaging machines measure the dimensions of products, cut cardboard at lightning speed and glue together custom-made packages.

Why do these two starkly contrasting worlds exist side by side? "In the automated section, we pick robust products that we sell in very large quantities," Halbeis explains. "These include underwear, socks and headphones." Meanwhile, the people in the picktower handle more fragile goods, such as glass Christmas baubles, drinks and cleaning products.

If, say, a problem arises and a corridor in the warehouse gets blocked, the teams there can coordinate very quickly, find a solution together and decide on new pathways, for example. The pickers also recognise if, for instance, packaging is damaged or liquid is leaking out. "Although a purely automatic system works faster than the pickers, a breakdown in a single machine can cause a chain reaction that brings the system to a complete standstill," Halbeis says.

Like an airport control tower

In the control room, staff keep a particularly watchful eye on the automated area of the warehouse. Twelve people there monitor a total of fifty screens. The scene is a lot like in an airport control tower.

"For instance, we have to react immediately if a packaging machine has a problem with the carton supply," explains Halil Aydin, the person in charge of the control centre that day. "Then we inform the responsible technicians so that they can fix the problem right away."

By now it's almost 2 p.m. Siyagona Fernando's shift, which began at 5 a.m., is gradually coming to an end. Soon she'll be able to take off her hi-vis jacket and put her steel toecapped shoes back in her locker. Her husband and four-year-old daughter are waiting for her at home – as is a magnificent Christmas tree. The fairy lights, mini reindeers and cornflowers with which the tree is decorated were all ordered online from Galaxus.