Heinrich Krumm

Heinrich Krumm (born December 7, 1896 in Offenbach am Main , † March 3, 1957 in Eisenach ) was a German leather goods manufacturer in Offenbach. Under his leadership, the Goldpfeil company developed into a global brand.

Life

Krumm's work: leather goods as a brand. Gold Arrow advertisement from 1938

Krumms father was Anton Krumm , with shareholders Offenbach's leather goods factory Ludwig Krumm and grandson of the company founder Ludwig Krumm .

Krumm attended the Swiss commercial school boarding school Château du Rosey. After completing an apprenticeship in the family business, commercial traineeships in London followed. In 1914 he returned to Germany and took part in the First World War as an officer .

After joining the leather goods factory, he asserted himself as a young partner alongside Uncle Moritz Krumm , who was inclined to patriarchal management . Heinrich Krumm expanded the business area to the United States . In 1924, the family business was converted into a stock corporation, and Krumm joined the board of directors.

In the mid-twenties, Krumm caused the move away from the conventional line of Offenbacher leather goods to switch to fashionable products. A novelty in the German leather goods industry was the use of artistic forces for model design, who had been appointed by Hugo Eberhardt to the newly created specialist class and model workshop of the Offenbach School of Applied Arts . Leo Schumacher, professor at the Offenbach School of Applied Arts, became the artist responsible for the entire gold arrow production and a member of the company's board of directors. Following this fashionable individualization, Krumm also put an end to the anonymity in which Offenbach's leather goods industry had worked until then and introduced the Gold-Pfeil brand in 1931 . Thanks to Krumm's measures, the company became a global brand for leather goods. Krumm's successful innovations quickly found imitation. The introduction of brands in the German leather goods industry resulted in a significant improvement in quality.

Krumm has been on the board of the leather goods association since 1923, head of the bag-making department since 1935, head of the leather goods and suitcase industry group since 1941 and head of the leather industry business group since 1944. He was the first to introduce REFA production in the leather goods industry .

He had a fatal accident on a trip to the Leipzig trade fair . He is buried in the old cemetery in Offenbach .

Web links

Krumm, Heinrich. Hessian biography (as of March 11, 2013). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS). Hessian State Office for Historical Cultural Studies (HLGL), accessed on May 15, 2016 . 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Hugo Eberhardt:  Krumm, Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-428-00194-X , p. 121 f. ( Digitized version ).