Lighthouse group

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Lighthouse group

logo
legal form GmbH & Co. KG
founding 1917
Seat Geesthacht , Schleswig-Holstein
management Kurt Stürken, Axel Stürken,
Max Stürken, Philip Döbler
Number of employees around 500
sales approx. 60 million € (2018)
Branch Industry and Commerce
Website Leuchtturmgruppe.com

The Lighthouse Group (according to its own case also LIGHTHOUSE GROUP) is an industrial and trading company based in Geesthacht near Hamburg, which as the world's leading provider of scrapbooks for stamps and coins valid. Customers include wholesalers and retailers in Germany and abroad as well as consumers. The majority of the company shares are held by the Stürken family.

history

On May 8, 1917 founded lithographer and lithographer Paul Koch with a partner in Aschersleben the company Koch & Bein (1923 Paul Koch GmbH), which established the still issued KABE stamp albums. The brand name KABE, protected in 1923, was derived from the first letters of the K OMET B stamp albums . In 1937 Koch had to sell the KABE publishing house to the Volkhardt family from Aschersleben.

After the nationalization of their company, the Volkhardts fled to Göppingen in 1953 with the printing templates for the stamp albums and rebuilt the company there. Paul Koch founded a new stamp album publishing company in Hamburg as early as 1948 - the Leuchtturm Albenverlag. His son Eberhard Koch sold the publishing house in 1959 to the Hamburg businessman Wolfgang Schön. In 1962 he brought the Hamburg businessman Kurt Stürken into the company, who developed the export business for the postage stamp album publishing house. In the following decades, Stürken gradually acquired the majority from the childless Wolfgang Schön. In 1972 Kurt Stürken became a managing partner and was involved in the company's operations until 1998.

From 1992 the two stamp album publishers KABE and Leuchtturm, founded by Paul Koch, cooperated in the fields of production and purchasing. When the succession at KABE could not be resolved, it made sense to merge the two companies in 1997. Axel Stürken has been a member of the company management since 1997, his younger brother Max since 2003.

In 2019, Kurt Stürken, Axel Stürken and Max Stürken were named family entrepreneurs of the year as shareholders of the Leuchtturm Group .

The Leuchtturm Group has the legal form of a GmbH & Co. KG and employs around 500 people at nine locations: Geesthacht, Fairfield ( New Jersey , USA ), Dorval ( Canada ), Körmend ( Hungary ), Guangzhou and Shanghai ( PR China ) , Sahline ( Tunisia ), Vimperk ( Czech Republic ) and Örebro ( Sweden ) in production, administration, home work and field service.

Products

Leuchtturm has been producing stamp albums since the company was founded in 1917 . These include slip-in postage albums and, as the most well-known product from Leuchtturm, the so-called SF album, a pre-printed postage album with clip pockets .

In addition, Leuchtturm publishes the Germany Netto Catalog (DNK), which has existed since 1931 . It is a stamp catalog that catalogs all German stamps since 1848 and is numbered according to MICHEL numbers.

Since the introduction of the euro coins in 2002, Leuchtturm has also been a major manufacturer of coin albums as well as cases, cassettes and capsules for collecting coins. Since 2003, the lighthouse is the Euro catalog is a standard work for all in the Euro Zone published share price and commemorative coins out. In addition to the accessories for stamp and coin collectors, the range includes paper, office and stationery as well as photo albums and stationery , including in particular notebooks and calendars , which have been marketed under the Leuchtturm1917 brand since 2005 and under the direction of Philip Döbler.

The stamps illustrated albums of the lighthouse, like the Catalogs DNK and EUR catalog in Germany due to the fixed book price law and in Austria because of the federal law on the fixing of book price-controlled publishing articles.

Subsidiaries and other brands (selection)

In April 2000, the subsidiary Torquato AG was founded in Geesthacht. It is a multichannel company and employs over 70 people under the management of Moritz Stürken. Torquato sells lifestyle and gift items in the broadest sense in the online and mail order business as well as through a network of branches in Hamburg ( Große Bleichen ), Düsseldorf (near Königsallee ), Berlin (near Kurfürstendamm ), Münster (near Prinzipalmarkt ) and Munich (Schäfflerhof).

In 2015 the Leuchtturm Group took over the brands Semikolon (photo albums, notebooks and boxes) and Treuleben & Bischof (handmade calendars and notebooks, leather goods). In 2016, Hamburg-based Bethge GmbH , which sells high-quality printed matter, leather goods and writing implements , was purchased. Bethge operates an online shop as well as shops in Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Munich.

In the USA since 1967 and Canada since 1972, the company's products have been sold under the company name "Lighthouse Publications".

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Family entrepreneur of the year 2019 impulse.de
  2. ↑ a b c d What is this family company's recipe for success? welt.de
  3. ↑ Florian Langenscheidt , Bernd Venohr (Hrsg.): Lexicon of German world market leaders. The premier class of German companies in words and pictures. German Standards Editions, Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-86936-221-2 .
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h Jürgen Hoffmann: Success with jagged values . June 25, 2019 ( welt.de [accessed October 6, 2019]).
  5. ^ Address book of the German book trade 1948 , on books.google.de
  6. ↑ Newsletter of the Postage Stamp Trade, December 1953, p. 5
  7. ↑ Reiner Mühle: "Briefmarkenalben-Verlag in Aschersleben : PaKo, Ka-Be, KA-BE, ABRIA, KA-BE, Phila-Production", 2003
  8. ↑ Paul Goes (ed.): The district of Göppingen. 1973, on books.google.de
  9. ↑ Nachrichtenblatt des Briefmarkenhandel, December 1996, p. 21
  10. ↑ "A brand not just for brands", in: Handelsblatt, November 9, 2017
  11. ↑ "Elephant wedding: lighthouse takes over KABE!", In: Deutsche Briefmarken-Revue No. 11 / 1.11.1997
  12. ↑ NDR: DIE FAMILIENUNTERNEHMER and DIE JUNGEN UNTERNEHMER in Hamburg voted their family entrepreneur of the year. Retrieved September 29, 2019 .
  13. ↑ "By the time one idea ignites, nine others have failed". Retrieved October 4, 2019 .
  14. ^ "The other side of the euro" in Hamburger Abendblatt, August 13, 2002
  15. ^ "Mail order company Torquato relied more on its own stores", Hamburger Abendblatt, April 17, 2014
  16. ↑ "Everything for this moment" in: The Stylists, supplement to DIE WELT Hamburg, September 22, 1017
  17. ↑ Günter Olzog : Documentation of German-language publishers limited preview in the Google book search