Carl Kaiser (entrepreneur)

Carl Kaiser (born April 14, 1859 in Geiselbach ; † February 15, 1945 near Leipzig ) was a German entrepreneur and owner of the Steigerwald & Kaiser department store chain .

Life

Carl Kaiser was the son of the Geiselbach farmer Johannes Kaiser and his wife Elisabeth, née Giron. He completed an apprenticeship in the Steigerwald general store in Schöllkrippen . In 1878 he became HR manager of a larger company in Würzburg and in 1882 branch manager of a large Munich textile company.

At the age of twenty-five, Carl Kaiser founded Steigerwald & Kaiser in Leipzig on February 12, 1885, together with Wilhelm Steigerwald, the son of the general store owner in Schöllkrippen . In 1889, the young company bought the von Hauck family's patrician house, reminiscent of a palace, on Königsplatz in Leipzig and made it the parent company.

Branch stores were opened in Frankfurt in 1894, Magdeburg and Chemnitz in 1895, and Dresden in 1897. In 1908 the company in Dresden also took over the Siegfried Schlesinger fashion house and thus became the royal Romanian purveyor to the court . The company was run as a family business, in which Geiselbach relatives were preferably appointed as managing directors or department heads after adequate training. At its peak, the company had around 1,500 employees. Most of their inner-city department stores were destroyed by bombing during World War II.

It is documented that Kaiser “took social measures for his employees who were quite new and unfamiliar for the time”, because in 1910 he opened savings accounts for all employees to protect the young and unmarried employees and founded an old age fund. He held the title of Commerce Councilor . He was made an honorary citizen in his hometown because of his charity. On February 15, 1945, he died of an acute illness on his homestead near Leipzig.

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Marion Stahl: Fashion store opened on Königsplatz in Leipzig , Main-Netz Media GmbH, May 22, 2010.
2. ^ Anne Bohnet-Waldraff: The Carsch House in Düsseldorf and the early department store architecture in Germany
3. ↑ Photo of the fashion store Steigerwald & Kaiser, Breiter Weg 152-154, Magdeburg  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ↑ Photo of the Chemnitz Marktgäßchen with the shop windows of the Steigerwald & Kaiser fashion house around 1940.