Wheels Car Rental System Takes on Jerusalema Challenge - and Goes Big

The world is figuring out various ways to say goodbye to 2020 — arguably the most challenging in our lifetimes. The management and staff at Wheels Car Rental System, a global provider of cloud-based car rental software based in Athens, Greece, decided to thank their internal staff, clients, and vendors with a holiday video.

They decided to take it on in the spirit and style of the Jerusalema Challenge, which started in South Africa as a dance off during the pandemic and has since gone viral with groups around the world.

View the video here.

Vassilis Devletoglou, managing director at Wheels, explains the genesis of Wheels effort and how the project grew larger than expected:

“As a company, we value our team and we feel that without them we wouldn’t be where we are. As a token of appreciation to their commitment and hard work, and as a way to lift the spirit of our customers and partners, we decided to make this video after watching a similar attempt in Youtube.

I was really scared that bringing the idea to the office to a team of hardcore IT professionals would get be booed; however, people welcomed the idea and put more ideas to the table making it a real team effort.

Turning the idea into the video was a challenge — one we had not seen it coming in our wildest dreams. Where do I start? Getting uniforms for everyone when all stores are closed; getting team members working from other countries, like Ines Hadzic, our senior account manager, who is located in Turkey to participate; finding a crew that can come to the office and teach us the choreography — remember we are developers. I don’t even remember dancing in my wedding!

I need to thank my wife Vana Papadimitriou, also our sales director, who pulled strings I can’t even imagine to get everything done on time.

The video was produced by a group of professionals who worked tirelessly around the clock to get this ready in a very short time, to make us look decent, and with various constraints. Keep in mind that Greece is on lock down and we can’t move freely.

At the end, watching the final video I said to myself, ‘Hey, I can dance; actually we discovered we all can, and we now have a video we can show our grand-children and brag about.’

I want to give kudos to everyone on the team for making this happen; for the hard work in the three weeks to learn the choreography and not stepping into each other; for the cold we experienced when shooting on the roof of our office building; and for the fun spirit. Believe me we had incredible fun filming this.”