Alfons Müller-Wipperfürth
Alfons Müller-Wipperfürth (* May 21, 1911 as Alfons Müller in Mönchengladbach ; † January 4, 1986 in Bad Gastein ) was a menswear manufacturer.
Life
On September 15, 1931, Müller took over his father's business in Mönchengladbach. After a bankruptcy , Müller started new production in Wipperfürth after the Second World War . He started a men's trousers factory there with three sewing machines and seven seamstresses in a rented former bomb factory. During the currency reform in 1948, the company had 400 employees, and in 1954 915 employees. As early as 1948, Müller was producing 1,000 suits a day.
Due to difficulties with the textile dealers, Müller took over the distribution himself. At first he sold from trucks, soon he opened his first own shops. His business principle was: "From the factory directly to the customer". In 1951 he was already the owner of 50 shops, mostly in prime downtown locations. In 1952, with the approval of the city and the government, Müller adopted the name “Müller-Wipperfürth”. Unlike his competitors, he ran the tailoring business, which had been a handicraft until then , based on the production principles developed by Henry Ford . His cutting machines were able to cut twice as many lengths of fabric as those of his competitors. As early as the early 1950s, he was able to cut 300 lengths of fabric on top of each other in one operation.
In the 1950s he became one of the most successful textile entrepreneurs in Germany. He founded his first plant outside of Germany in 1961 in Neufelden, Austria . Soon other plants were added in the Belgian Pepinster and Alleur . In order to keep his sales prices low, he developed the plan of a vertically integrated group: spinning mills and weaving mills had to be added. To do this, he took over suppliers, some of them cheaply from the bankruptcy estate . After the takeover , he invested in the latest manufacturing technology and increased efficiency . He set up his central warehouse in Wipperfürth , from which all shops were regularly supplied with their own vehicle fleet. In its prime, his textile company had 18 factories in six countries with over 220 clothing stores and over 8,000 employees; Müller-Wipperfürth had advanced to the so-called "Rhenish Hosenkönig".
However, the tax office demanded that he pay back taxes of six million DM because it assumed that he would take back goods that had already been sold as unsalable returns from abroad. According to the tax investigation department , he exported to Austria too cheaply to move profits abroad. Contemporary witnesses assume that if the transfer price between his German and Austrian companies had been higher, the Austrian tax authorities would have investigated him for tax shift. After Müller-Wipperfürth paid a further six million DM in taxes after some delay, the tax office demanded a further five million DM.Müller-Wipperfürth relocated its corporate headquarters to Lugano and managed his company by calling his sales and plant managers daily by plane to report to Lugano and split his company into a stock corporation , which included the factories, and a GmbH , in which the sales outlets are combined.
He continued his entrepreneurial management style internationally by setting up another plant in Monastir, Tunisia, with German grants of two million DM, where he earned the nickname “Ben Wipp” with extremely low wages and a reliable workforce. He had to struggle with logistical problems which led to the closure of the plant after the 1.5 to 2 years prescribed for subsidization.
During regular inspection flights of his company empire, he flew over Germany on the way from Austria directly to Belgium. Problems with the airplane led to a crash over a house in the Eifel on March 14, 1964 , in which three people died and Müller-Wipperfürth was admitted to the Mayen hospital injured . Müller-Wipperfürth claimed to have got caught in the wake of a fighter jet, whereas the Federal Aviation Office accused him of having flown without a blind flight license in blind flight weather conditions. An examination of the wreck of the almost new twin-engine Beechcraft Queen Air with the registration number HB-GBE finally revealed that the horizontal stabilizer had been torn off at a height of 2500 meters because the control cables were apparently due to constant overuse by the pilot, who is known to fellow pilots for his daring flight maneuvers had become defective. The tax investigators arrested him in the hospital and transferred him to the detention hospital in Düsseldorf because of the risk of escape , in order to emphasize the renewed tax demand. For a deposit of one million DM he came to an orthopedic clinic in Cologne , from where he returned to Lugano by plane and paid a further 13 million DM in taxes.
The economic success then subsided. Müller-Wipperfürth was considered to be extremely suspicious of his environment and reserved all decisions personally. The IHB Investitions- und Handelsbank, which has held a 49% stake since 1964, poured in more money. He no longer recognized the fashionable market trends, away from the suit, towards casual clothing that did not suit his personal taste, which led to an economic slump. New fashions were reluctantly accepted; the shops still had the charm of the 1950s. Thus, in 1978, the end of the company threatened. Together with other banks, the IHB forced Müller-Wipperfürth to withdraw from its German factories. In 1970 he had relocated 80% of his production abroad, but where he did not have an adequate sales network. When he realized that he had lost the fight, he gave away parts of the business to his children from several marriages who were previously only employees. He sold his aircraft fleet and withdrew into his private life, mainly to Neufelden, Austria.
Even the change of name and additional loans from the Hessische Landesbank for modernization could not save the sales outlets.
In 1981 the last pending tax proceedings were discontinued. The last shop closed in 1982.
Private
In Belgium he already owned the château du Joncmesnil in Lambermont near Verviers , later he had domiciles in Austria and Monaco and at the same time built a villa in Via Matorèll 41 in Montagnola on the Collina d'Oro not far from Lugano in Switzerland . All his private passion was aviation. As early as 1955 he had his own fleet of aircraft, which enabled the avid aviator to constantly check his plants and businesses himself without prior notification. Since Lugano did not have an airport at that time, he had his own airfield built in Agno near Lugano, to which he added his own hotel “La Perla” and a residential area inhabited by prominent artists. He also had an airfield built in Frammersbach , which is now only used for model airplanes . In a plane crash on March 14, 1964 at 3:35 p.m. on the flight from Liège (Belgium) to Linz (Austria) to an estate in the Eifel village of Kehrig ( Mayen district ), Müller-Wipperfürth got away with the horror.
literature
- Jürgen Weise: Müller-Wipperfürth, Alfons. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , p. 513 f. ( Digitized version ).
TV documentary
- Lifelong dreams: Alfons Müller-Wipperfürth ( memento from November 16, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) at NDR
Individual evidence
- ↑ Stefan Corssen: Alfons Müller-Wipperfürth: Rise and fall of the king of pants . In: Kölnische Rundschau . ( rundschau-online.de [accessed on January 5, 2017]).
- ↑ Pants from the South . In: Der Spiegel . No. 38 , 1962 ( online ).
- ↑ ASN Wikibase Occurence # 170276, English summary, retrieved on March 8, 2018
- ↑ Once a millionaire and back . In: Die Zeit , 16/2002
- ↑ The king does not want to give way . In: The time . January 31, 1975, ISSN 0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed January 6, 2017]).
- ↑ Done with the Germans . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 1959, pp. 26 ( online ).
- ↑ Frammersbach Airfield ( Memento from November 16, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ PROCESSES: Müller-Wipperfürth . In: Der Spiegel . No. 48 , 1969 ( online ).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Müller-Wipperfürth, Alfons |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Müller, Alfons |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German textile manufacturer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 21, 1911 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Mönchengladbach |
| DATE OF DEATH | 4th January 1986 |
| Place of death | Bad Gastein |