More AI, more price transparency – dispatches from Hackfest

Martin Jungfer

12.6.2025

Translation: Katherine Martin

Ten thousand precious working hours went into this year’s Digitec Galaxus hackathon. But as the winning projects demonstrate, it seems like it was time well spent.

Maybe the reason so many employees are drawn to Hackfest year after year is the very special trophy up for grabs. If a competing team comes up trumps, they can win a unique piece of Swiss business history: the year 2000 edition of the Microsoft Access manual. Back in the day, Digitec founder Florian Teuteberg lugged the tome with him on a summer holiday to Greece. Once he’d graduated from university, he and his co-founders programmed the software to write their first online shop. And the rest, as they say, is history.

What is a hackathon?

At a hackathon, developers, designers and product experts work together intensively for a limited period of time. The goal? To jointly develop innovative solutions for specific problems. Digitec Galaxus’s hackathon is known as Hackfest. Rather than perfect execution, the focus of the event is quick implementation and creativity. At the end, teams present their results to a jury and an audience. There are also prizes for the best ideas or implementations. At Hackfest, the victorious teams are rewarded with team events. Our hackathon takes place once a year, starting with a communal breakfast and ending 54 hours later with a drinks reception.

In monetary terms, the book is worth peanuts. You can get it for a few francs or euros on resale platforms, sometimes even with a CD-ROM included. The sentimental value is higher. So, at the end of the three-day hackathon, Team Genius Filters was delighted to receive the award from CEO Florian Teuteberg and Chief Innovation Officer Oliver Herren. They’ll get to hang on to the book aka travelling trophy until next year’s Hackfest.

Free text, not filters

The team impressed the company cofounders with an idea that you and other customers might like too. In future, you may not have to painstakingly select a bunch of filters to narrow down product search results. Instead simply typing something like «laptop with 16 GB of RAM, good display, weighs less than 1.5 kilogrammes, not from Apple» would be enough to pinpoint what you’re looking for. To achieve this, Team Genius Filters installed an AI behind the text input feature. This interpreted the searcher’s requirements and then selected and displayed the products they were looking for.

The feature worked a treat during the team’s three-minute pitch, so it came as no surprise when, speaking after the event, CIO Oliver Herren gave the green light for it to be implemented in the shop as soon as possible.

Ideas for internal efficiency

A total of 24 teams with 171 participants signed up for the hackathon. The event saw experts from different departments and teams, who usually have little contact with each other, come together to work on a specific issue. Otherwise, building functional prototypes in under three days would’ve been impossible.

The final audience vote in the «Efficient processes» category was won by Team Dude Where’s My Data. As their team name suggests, the group presented a solution better able to cope with the large demand for data in day-to-day work.

Ideas to boost customer satisfaction

A team named «Is the price actually right?» came out on top in the «Customer satisfaction» category. Their goal was to make our shop’s price transparency tool more useful to customers. During their pitch, the team argued that you shouldn’t need to be an experienced crypto broker to figure out the best time to buy something. With this in mind, they suggested the tool be turned into an easily understandable display that uses green, yellow or red to show how attractive a product’s current price is.

The team behind the price barometer was made up of experts from the frontend, UX, data and product sectors. These very diverse roles were key to the group’s success, as was the fact that the issue was close to everyone’s hearts. «We were even happier about the fact that our idea went down so well with Hackfest attendees,» says Clara Goebel, Product Owner.

Another member of the winning team, Product Owner Michael Stähelin, added that they’d been hoping their idea would make it into the top three. Ending up snagging first place, he said, came as a big surprise – especially given how strong the competition was.

No-print returns

Taking second place in the «Customer satisfaction» category was Team Labelless Returns, who «hacked» our returns process so that customers wouldn’t have to print a return label when sending back a product. Under this system, all you’d need to return a parcel via Swiss Post would be a QR code on your phone. While that might have a negative impact on printer sales, it’ll certainly be a relief for customers.

Which of our Hackfest ideas (filters, product search AI, a new price transparency tool) have caught your interest? What idea would you have submitted? Let us know in the comments. If reading this has made you interested in working for us, feel free to check out our current vacancies.

Martin Jungfer

Head of Content

Martin.Jungfer@digitecgalaxus.ch

Journalist since 1997. Stopovers in Franconia (or the Franken region), Lake Constance, Obwalden, Nidwalden and Zurich. Father since 2014. Expert in editorial organisation and motivation. Focus on sustainability, home office tools, beautiful things for the home, creative toys and sports equipment. more

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