Bally (shoe manufacturer)

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Bally company logo since 2008
Men's Bally shoe - crocodile with CITES certificate - welted

Bally is a Swiss shoe manufacturer founded in 1851 by Carl Franz Bally in Schönenwerd in the canton of Solothurn .

The company initially manufactured women's and men's shoes, and later also accessories . The international luxury brand Bally (as a manufacturer of shoes, clothing and accessories), whose owners changed several times from the mid-1970s. Since 2008, Bally has been owned by JAB Holding . At the beginning of February 2018, JAB sold the majority stake in Bally for 700 million US dollars to the Chinese textile company Shandong Ruyi, which has owned the brands Cerruti and Aquascutum after acquisitions , but retained a minority stake.

history

Foundation and global expansion

Registered share for CHF 1000 in CF Bally AG dated October 3, 1907
Bally branch in Hong Kong (2009)
Bally branch in Bonn (1988)
Bally Shoe Museum in Schönenwerd (2011)

In 1851 Carl Franz Bally (1822–1899) and his brother Fritz Bally founded the “Bally & Co.” shoe factory. founded in Schönenwerd, Switzerland. This factory emerged from the company taken over from the father, a rubber band and suspender manufacturer. Fritz resigned in 1854 out of the operation, prompting the company in CF Bally Co . was renamed and branches in Bern , Basel and Zurich opened.

By 1860, Bally had more than 500 workers. After another decade, the company also expanded outside of Switzerland with branches in Buenos Aires , Montevideo and Paris . Bally shoes have become luxury products thanks to their excellent materials, quality and workmanship.

Carl Franz Bally died in 1899 and the company was continued by his sons Eduard and Arthur. At that time, around 2 million pairs of shoes were produced annually and sold in numerous European countries as well as North and South America. The company employed 3200 people. In 1907 the company went public, but the Bally family retained the majority of the votes. The additional capital allowed massive expansion. The Bally company logo was first introduced in 1908 and graced advertising poster campaigns created by various artists. In 1916 the company employed more than 7,000 people and produced 3.9 million pairs of shoes.

Bally survived the Great Depression and World War II by expanding the portfolio to include athletic shoes and military boots. In the post-war period, the company expanded and successfully established itself in the global market. In 1942, Carl Franz Bally's former home at Zum Felsengarten in Schönenwerd was converted into a shoe museum, which still exists today as the Bally shoe museum . In 1951 Max Bally, grandson of CF Bally, launched the Scribe , a welted men's shoe that was named after the Parisian Hôtel Scribe and is still manufactured today. In 1953, Edmund Hillary wore Bally boots for the first ascent of Mount Everest . In 1976 clothing, handbags and other leather accessories were added to the range.

Difficult times, sales and a new beginning

In 1976, the Swiss financial speculator Werner K. Rey obtained the majority of shares in Bally, which he had to sell the following year under public pressure.

In 1977 the Bally family withdrew from the company. The defense company Oerlikon-Bührle under Dieter Bührle took over the majority of shares from Rey in 1977. Hard times followed as the company was increasingly beset by cheap imports from developing countries that flooded the world market. Mismanagement, imprudent licensing and inevitable quality degradation in the 1980s damaged the reputation of the Bally brand. Due to the decentralized organizational structure of Bally International AG, Bally had completely different, inconsistent profiles depending on the country. Thousands of employees were laid off in the recession-marked years from 1990 onwards and numerous factories were closed, including the headquarters in Schönenwerd. The operating loss in 1995 amounted to 6.7 million Swiss francs. In the fall of 1997, Bally sent a special train through Germany, from which remaining stock shoes from the years 1992 to 1996 were sold in the stations of several major cities.

Oerlikon-Bührle sold its Bally shares in 1999 to the US investment company Texas Pacific Group (TPG). During this time, Bally ran over 400 of its own boutiques. TPG restructured operations, downsized the branch network, changed the distribution concept and appointed Italian and former Gucci manager Marco Franchini as CEO and New York designer and former Salvatore Ferragamo employee Scott Fellows as creative director.

Bally repositioned itself increasingly successfully as a lifestyle brand in the luxury segment. The focus was again on the core business of shoes and since 2004 the company has been back in the black. In 2001 the company celebrated its 150th anniversary. The chief designer Fellows left the company at the end of 2002 because his creations were not commercially successful; he was followed by the designer Luca Ragonese (1969–2006) until 2006.

The company's headquarters have been in Caslano , Switzerland , since 2000 , where the company already had a production facility. The relocation of the company headquarters from Schönenwerd to Ticino was due to the proximity to the fashion metropolis of Milan . In 2007, the Fondazione Bally per la Cultura ("Bally Foundation for Culture") was founded in Caslano to promote artists from the Ticino region .

JAB

"Bally House" in Stuttgart (2010)

In April 2008 the company was sold again for an estimated € 370 million. The new owner, the Labelux Group GmbH founded in Vienna in 2007 (from 2014: JAB Luxury ), belongs to the German Johann A. Benckiser SE (JAB Holding), which also owns a share in Reckitt Benckiser . As of 2011, the Labelux Group also included the brands Belstaff (clothing), Jimmy Choo , Derek Lam and Solange Azagury-Partridge (jewelry). At the end of 2011, the group relocated from Vienna to Caslano, the location of Bally's headquarters.

From 2009 the German Berndt Hauptkorn (* 1968) succeeded Marco Franchini and thus CEO of Bally. Hauptkorn was already involved in building up the Labelux Group from 2007 and held the position of CEO there until the end of 2009. He left the company in December 2011. Reinhard Mieck, CEO of the Labelux Group since the beginning of 2010 and employee at Reckitt Benckiser from 1997, took over the position on an interim basis.

From February 2007, the American Brian Atwood, previously a designer at Versace and designer of his own shoe label, was creative director at Bally. For the 2010 summer campaign , Bally hired model Christy Turlington and actor Til Schweiger as testimonials .

In spring 2010, the Labelux Group announced that it was parting with Atwood and that it would be replaced by the former Aquascutum designers Graeme Fidler and Michael Herz from Great Britain . Bally's design studio (15 employees) has since been in London (closed in 2017), production remained in Italy. Marketing, design and communication are managed from Milan. Fidler and Herz resigned in early 2013. In early 2014, the Argentine Pablo Coppola was appointed Bally's new creative director. Coppola left the company at the end of 2016. An in-house design team has been taking care of the collections ever since.

In June 2014, the owner Benckiser (JAB Holding) dissolved the Labelux Group and bundled the Bally brand alongside Jimmy Choo and Belstaff in the JAB Luxury division.

Bally today

In early 2018, the Chinese textile group Shandong Ruyi, founded in 1972, took over the majority of Bally, while JAB Holding retained a minority stake. The unpublished purchase price was estimated by experts at $ 700 million.

Bally sales were last stated for 2008 at € 400 million, and no figures have been published since. At the end of the 2000s, Bally sales consisted of shoes (50%), bags and accessories (40%) and clothing (10%). In 2011 the company employed 1560 people, 430 of them in Switzerland. In 2018 there were around 1600 employees worldwide. As of 2018, Bally had 160 branches worldwide - in Germany in Berlin , Düsseldorf , Hamburg , Frankfurt am Main and Munich as well as factory outlets in Metzingen and Wertheim - as well as an online shop since 2009 and serves numerous independent business partners worldwide. There are so-called Bally flagship stores in London, Los Angeles, Tokyo and New York .

Bally in popular culture

In the late 1980s, Bally shoes achieved cult status among rappers . Well-known representatives of the scene mentioned Bally in their songs, including Jay-Z and Slick Rick . The latter rapped the following sentence in 1985 in "The Show / La Di Da Di": Put on the Bally shoes and the fly green socks . The rapper Rick Ross pointed in 2010 to this song, pointing to his collaboration with P. Diddy Another One rapped: 1.5 for this brand new black Bugatti // jewels like I'm Slick Rick, Bally shoes, La Di Da Di . Bally shoes are also an icon of the old school scene.

literature

Web links

Commons : Bally  - collection of images, videos and audio files

swell

  1. ↑ ladu. / Reuters : Traditional company: Chinese buy Swiss luxury company Bally. In: FAZ.net February 9, 2018.
  2. ↑ Community of Schönenwerd - Bally shoe museum, Oltnerstr. 6 , schoenenwerd.ch, accessed: July 15, 2011
  3. ↑ Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag - Bally und die Bergsteiger  ( page no longer available , search in web archives ), magazin-z.ch, January 18, 2010@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.magazin-z.ch
  4. ↑ Werner K. Rey , spiegel.de, September 12, 1988
  5. ^ Dark consorts , spiegel.de, July 18, 1977
  6. ↑ Der Ladenhüter  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / Wissen.manager-magazin.de , manager-magazin.de, September 1 , 1999
  7. ^ The Bally company came to the main train station berliner-kurier.de on November 6, 1997 on a special train
  8. ↑ The Schuh-Schuh-Train is here mopo.de, November 4, 1997
  9. ↑ Chronology: A company reinvents itself. bilanz.ch, September 20, 2005.
  10. ↑ Bally: Kleiner und feiner , bilanz.ch, September 20, 2005.
  11. ↑ New owner for Bally: Texas Pacific sells traditional company to Labelux.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.handelszeitung.ch handelszeitung.ch, April 23, 2008.
  12. ↑ Luxurious appearance , bilanz.ch, March 22, 2005.
  13. ↑ Interview with: Scott Fellows , persoenlich.com, February 2002.
  14. ↑ a b Bally shoes are running again. Morgenpost.de, October 13, 2007.
  15. ↑ Bally: Kleiner und feiner , bilanz.ch, September 20, 2005
  16. ^ Bally designer died  ( page no longer available , search in web archives ), textilwirtschaft.de, June 22, 2006.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.textilwirtschaft.de
  17. ↑ a b Benckiser: from Calgon to Bally. manager-magazin.de, August 11, 2008.
  18. ↑ Financial investor sells Bally shoes ( memento from August 2, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) , ft.de, April 23, 2008.
  19. ↑ Berndt Hauptkorn quietly buys luxury brands. handelsblatt.com, June 26, 2009.
  20. ↑ Bally gets a new boss. textilwirtschaft.de, October 30, 2009.
  21. ↑ a b Bally: Déjà vu. In: bilanz.ch from January 13, 2012.
  22. ^ Bally & Brian Atwood: Helvetic-American Meetings. ( Memento of December 23, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) subwasief.de, April 28, 2008.
  23. ↑ Bally's Fashion Turn ( Memento of November 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) , dnrnews.com, June 25 , 2007 (English)
  24. ↑ shinyshoes.edelight.de: Til Schweiger for Bally ( Memento from May 27, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (March 22, 2010)
  25. ↑ Bolero: Bally's New. ( Memento from January 23, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (January 12, 2010)
  26. ↑ Textilwirtschaft: Bally: New design team with Graeme Fidler and Michael Herz.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) (March 19, 2010)@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.textilwirtschaft.de
  27. ↑ Bye-bye, Bally! bilanz.ch, February 19, 2018
  28. ↑ Bally in Austrian hands. regiolive.ch, last accessed: August 15, 2008.
  29. ↑ Bally: Popular in hip-hop circles. 20min.ch, January 17, 2008.