Keskari
| Keskari
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| legal form | one-man business |
| founding | 1856 (changing company forms) |
| Seat | Kelkheim |
| management | Christoph Keskari |
| Branch | Sewing; Furs |
| Website | www.keskari.de |
The Keskari family , originally furriers in the Macedonian city of Ohrid , have been running a trading and production company in Germany since 1856, initially exclusively in the fur industry . The company name and the legal form changed several times, but Keskari was always part of the name. In the period after the Second World War , the focus was on the manufacture and trade of ingredients for fur production. Outstanding in the company's history is the construction of a new type of clip fastener, the so-called "Keska", which replaced the fasteners (buttons with button placket or hook and eye) that had been used in fur clothing until then. The Keska-style clip fastener is now the common fur fastener worldwide. Even after the patent protection has expired , the term Keska for a clip fastener is still in common use in the fur industry in German-speaking countries (2013).
Company history
.jpg)
Ochrida, today Ohrid , is, like the Greek Kastoria and Siatista , a place in Macedonia, today in North Macedonia , with a long tradition as a furrier town. In the Keskari family it is orally passed down that the ancestor Soter Keschar came from an old furrier family in Ochrida. It is also reported that he had to flee from there because he played a leading role in the attempt to liberate the Bulgarian church, which is under Turkish pressure. Via Trieste and Vienna, with the help of friends, he came to Leipzig, where the great European fur trade center, the Leipziger Brühl , was being established at the time .
When Sotar Keschar became a Saxon citizen, he changed his surname to Keskari, all current bearers of the name are descendants of the Sotar Keskari couple. In Leipzig he started his own tobacco shop, a balance sheet for 1868 lists the following inventory: "1394 white foxes , 2167 Virginia foxes , 5691 narrow fox backs, 640 fox throats". The aforementioned places, Ochrida no longer, are still mainly concerned with the processing of pieces of fur . One of the records still obtained demonstrated that he was offered as an intermediary between Leipzig and Ochrida 1867 by a Mr. Breuer from Paris as follows: "224 pounds Steinmarder pieces to 1 1 / 4 Thaler, 80 pounds Zobelstücken to 6 Thaler and 81 pounds Nerzstücken to 10 pennies the pound". Sotar Keskari bought the fur scraps everywhere and sent them to the Balkans or sold them there at the Leipzig trade fair . In 1900 Dimitri Ch. Totchkoff wrote: “At that time (after the Crimean War), Ochrida took advantage of this general upswing, and above all it was the large store founded by a Bulgarian in Leipzig, the Keskari company, which was a wide market for Ochridan furrier goods and above all, it created convenient and inexpensive sources of supply for the raw material to be processed in Ochrida ”.
Muff pockets for the furrier, prepared to be filled with fur
Muff pocket, trimmed with red fox fur (1971)
.jpg)
Long payment terms were a big problem for the fur wholesalers back then; many dealers only paid for the next trade fair or even only once a year. In 1868, the company's balance sheet showed an inventory of goods worth 5,475 thalers, the outstanding balance totaled 99,392 thalers. The present value was 562 Napoleon d'or and other foreign gold coins worth 3582 thalers. The payment habits were now changing rapidly, however, in 1878 there were around one million marks in inventory and the outstanding balance was only around 12,000 marks, and cash only around 4,000 marks.
The descendants of Sotar Keskari also learned to work in the tobacco industry. In July 1927, the men Leonidas Keskari and Erich Roesicke pleased to announce that it in Leipzig on the Knight Street 23/29 under the name Keskari & Roesicke a Rauchwarenhandels- and commission income have opened. In October 1929 they moved the business premises to Brühl No. 52 ( Gloeck's house ), and in April 1935 to Brühl 64–66. In 1929 they carried lambskin and lambskin tablets as special items. The company still existed under this name in 1944, a year before the end of the war, although Erich Rösicke had left the company in 1932 and Leonidas Keskari continued to run the company alone. In 1944, a trade journal noted that the Keskari & Rösicke company had been allocated Russian fur hare skins as part of the management of tobacco products , 50 percent of which can be used for domestic sales.
The time after the global economic crisis between 1928 and 1930 was also extremely difficult for Leonidas, the grandson of the company founder. At that time he traded a lot in the fur article Buenolamm , which was actually popular until the 1980s. In 1933 the shelves and baskets were full of lower-quality skins of this type, they seemed almost unsaleable. His wife, who was not in the business, but was engaged in making tapestry-embroidered bags as a hobby, gave him a very business-intensive idea. She had combined a muff with a handbag and suggested they occupy it with the "no good" Buenos. The furrier Albert Rosenstein ordered the first bag in Berlin, in the same year the utility model protection was registered and the next year the workshop ran out of Buenos Aires and you had to buy additional skins. That was the beginning of an important muffle bag and muffle bag production that still existed in 2017. At the end of 1935, the company C. Keskari & Co. , Leipzig, Lange Straße 8, with the branch "Manufacture of handbags and fur parts", was entered in the commercial register.
The two Leipzig factories run under the name Keskari were destroyed in the great air raid on December 4, 1943 . Hamburg and especially Frankfurt am Main, located at the foot of the Taunus, developed into the new fur industry centers of the Federal Republic after the Second World War (see also the fur trade center in Niddastraße ). Although Charlotte Keskari had previously rebuilt the business on a very small scale on Leibnizstrasse in Leipzig, the future of the industry was seen with the right foresight in the west. First in Buchen im Odenwald, later in Fischbach im Taunus, today a district of Kelkheim, a production facility with furrier and increasingly for furrier ingredients was established ; the company headquarters established itself, together with other fur companies, in Hamburg on Spaldingstrasse. The business area of the company changed from the tobacco trade to other branches of the fur industry. Various patents and utility models for furring accessories and tools have been registered in several countries.
With the considerable decline in German fur production since around the 1990s and the decline in furrier businesses in Europe in general - fur production shifted for the most part to Asia, in particular to China, which also has a very old furrier tradition - the domestic market for furrier products also decreased The patent protection for the Keska in the various countries could not be extended. After the death of Martin Keskari in August 1981, at the time also co-owner of the tobacco goods trading company Hermann Deninger in Frankfurt am Main, the company L. Keskari & Co was liquidated by the co-owners, his two sisters, and the branches in Hamburg and Cologne were closed or respectively sold. The wife Christiane Keskari founded the company C. Keskari as a sole proprietorship in Kelkheim and continued the business activity on a reduced scale. Since her death in 1985, the company has been run by her son Christoph Keskari.
In the past, the company also made products that were not related to fur, especially in the bag sector. One of the first really successful products after the Second World War was the “Lima” mat. It made it possible to expand production in larger numbers at a time when the fur industry had to recover. Another focus was the fine bag- making area with wallets, bags and the production of special bags for special areas of application and professions, especially bags made of technical textiles.
The Keska
.jpg)
In 1934 the company Arno Tasche from Leipzig offered a new type of clip fastener for furs. The clip could be covered with fur or made of high-gloss nickel-plated brass or oxide-colored in different colors. The opposite side, a ring, was held in place by a rubber band. Up until then, and to a large extent also in the future, it was customary to provide fur clothing with buttons and button strips as with textiles. Further alternatives were, due to the fur, mostly noticeably large, fur-covered buttons, trimmings, or hooks and eyes, but the latter did not offer a reliable hold. Since buttons and button placket on the valuable material were very annoying, the parts were often made without any means of closure, which is not a satisfactory solution, especially for winter clothing. Another variant, which is not much nicer and which also puts a lot of strain on the fur, is to work buttonholes in the fur itself or button loops in the front edge so that the buttons, unlike the button placket, are also visible when the fur is closed.
In 1952, the Keskari company manufactured the first "Keska" in its own workshop, a fastener for fur coats and jackets that was sewn in and barely visible for the first time. The development from the idea to the first implementation and patenting took almost a year. With this model, which was much smaller and inconspicuous from the Taschen company, the company filled a gap in the market at a time when Germany was experiencing the so-called economic miracle and was the main consumer and producer of fur goods. These were ideal conditions for the Klip to spread very quickly to almost all western fur-producing countries after the launch of the new product at the Frankfurt fur fair in 1952. The production of the fur clothing offered in Central Europe, which was soon relocated abroad in large parts, also contributed to this; in the times of the first fur boom, the production of the keskav fastener , which was also used for woven fur , soon amounted to several million a year. Even before the patent protection expired, the lock was reproduced in a similar way abroad, and then also in Germany.
A pair of fasteners consists of a clip and an eyelet, which are available in colors that harmonize with the fur or with a brass clip. The construction of the Keska consists of a foldable, resilient hook with a recess into which a pin on the base plate engages. The base plate is sewn onto the leather side of the hide, usually on an intermediate layer. The bail arm and the pin for locking are passed through small incisions on the hair side so that only they can be seen, as far as they are not covered by the hair. In the high-quality version, a leather insert was glued onto the top of the Keska. - The eyelet consists of a simple ring with a leather loop. When sewn in correctly, only half the eyelet peeps out of the fur, the incised leather is closed again with a hand seam after the half eyelet has been pushed through and the leather loop is sewn onto the leather side with a textile insert because of the risk of tearing. The wire ring, which was initially often covered with leather, has been replaced over the years by less sensitive plastic versions.
Today's product range
In addition to the aforementioned keskav closures, down-filled muffle bags and muff bags for the furrier trade, the Keskari company now also produces bags, rucksacks, seat cushions and accessories for fashion designers and artists as well as bags and covers for technical devices, both in its own sales department and on behalf of customers. Customers today are mainly freight forwarders, retail chains, manufacturers of electronic devices and all companies that have products that need to be kept and / or protected in a bag.
- Previous innovative products
Toilet cases
Bath bag, can also be used as a mat
Test series for a patented compressed air hair spray nozzle for fur sewing machines
Round furrier wire brush
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f Leonidas Keskari: Speech given to celebrate the 100-year tradition of the Keskari family and company on September 1, 1956
- ↑ Dimitri Ch. Totchkoff (Ochrida): Studies on tobacco trade and skinning, especially in Ochrida (Macedonia). Inaugural dissertation to obtain a doctorate from the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Heidelberg. University printing and publishing house, vorm. Ph. Wiese, Heidelberg 1900.
- ^ Announcement of the opening of the tobacco shop Keskari & Rödicke in Leipzig
- ↑ Editor: Business Changes . In: Der Rauchwarenmarkt No. 32/33, Leipzig April 26, 1935, p. 6.
- ↑ Editor: Change of location . In: Der Rauchwarenmarkt No. 124, Leipzig, October 17, 1929, p. 6.
- ↑ Commercial court entries. In: Der Rauchwarenmarkt No. 23, Leipzig, May 7, 1932, p. 7.
- ↑ Signed "R.": Russian fur hare skins for domestic use . In: Deutsche Kürschner-Zeitschrift and Kürschner-Zeitung. Publishers Arthur Heber & Co, Berlin / Alexander Duncker, Leipzig May 1944, p. 17.
- ↑ Entry of a “handbag with a device to protect hands against the cold” in the utility model roll
- ↑ Business News. In: Der Rauchwarenmarkt No. 92, Leipzig, December 6, 1935, p. 7.
- ↑ Mrs. Charlotte Keskari gives up the Leipzig company
- ↑ Selection of patent and utility model applications Last accessed February 23, 2013.
- ↑ Without indication of the author: Martin Keskari died . In: Winckelmann Pelzmarkt. No. 607, Winckelmann Verlag, Frankfurt am Main August 28, 1981, p. 17.
- ↑ Editorial office (and company advertisement ): The new clip fastener. In: Der Rauchwarenmarkt No. 26/27, Leipzig, April 7, 1934, p. 9.
- ↑ Without an author's name: The new movement in Parisian fur fashion . Quote: "[...] and therefore it was a piquant change when the buttons on the coats disappeared completely and our ladies were fully occupied with keeping the coats crossed at the front and anxiously making sure that the figure is very tight so that it looks as slim as possible ”. In: Die Pelzkonfektion , March 1925, Carl Schmalfeld, Berlin, p. 27.
- ^ Keskari company: 25 years >> Keska <<. Leaflet, undated (1977).
- ↑ Homepage of the company