Schunck
Schunck was the name of a textile goods store founded by Arnold Schunck in Heerlen in the Netherlands in 1874 .
Foundation, prosperity and decline ran parallel to those of the Dutch coal mining in the area around Heerlen. Over the course of time, the company operated various retail stores, including department stores in Heerlen and Geleen . Arnold Schunck's son Peter Joseph Schunck had the Glaspaleis (Glass Palace) built in the 1930s , which won various architecture prizes and is now the city's cultural center.
The Schunck company, which was later run in the legal form of a stock corporation , remained largely in the possession of the von Arnold Schunck family and his descendants until it was sold to the Berden company in 1995.
Today the Glaspaleis is a multidisciplinary cultural center for contemporary art, architecture, music, dance and a library under the name SCHUNCK *
history
1st generation
Arnold Schunck (born February 11, 1842 in Kettenis ( Eupen ), † October 15, 1905 in Heerlen), himself from a small weaving mill, learned the weaving trade in Aachen and then worked in the Eupen Fremerey dye works. In order to gain the experience necessary for his master craftsman examination, his years of traveling took him to Poland and Russia. In an abandoned copper mill in Hauset , he and his brother founded a workshop for finishing and dyeing , which, however, did not generate enough profit because the company could not produce under the favorable conditions as the up-and-coming industrial companies in neighboring Aachen and Eupen. That is why Schunck founded a small hand-weaving mill in Heerlen in 1874, which after a few years expanded into a textile shop with an attached drugstore (selling so-called “Kneipp products”).
The business was primarily run by his wife Anna Maria Küppers (born January 20, 1843 in Aachen, † November 20, 1930 in Heerlen). The target audience was primarily the mining workers who moved to the region in the context of industrialization and the up-and-coming coal mining, to whom he was initially able to sell particularly stable fabrics for work clothes and later finished garments, which was still unusual at the time. The success was also based on the central location; At that time Heerlen had only about 5,000 inhabitants, but a large area, initially characterized by agriculture and then more and more by coal mining and small industry.
2nd generation
Peter Joseph Schunck (born October 31, 1873 in Hauset, † July 13, 1960 in Heerlen), who took on responsibility for the company alongside his mother after the death of his father, acquired three buses around 1908 , which were operated several times according to a fixed timetable drove to the surrounding villages every day and brought their residents to the department store in Heerlen free of charge. In doing so, he practically operated the first public transport company in Heerlen.
Business was doing well in the late 1920s; Peter Schunck acquired several of the properties around the "old business" and was able to use them to expand the business. On part of this site, Peter Schunck had the Bauhaus style glass palace built by Heerlen architect Frits Peutz (1896–1974) , the opening of which in 1935 attracted great attention far beyond Heerlen, not least because it took place in the middle of the crisis. The 27 m high building was considered a high-rise. Because the construction with the suspended glass facades was taken over from the skyscrapers . In 1954 Schunck opened a branch in the western part of the Dutch coal mining area, in Geleen . Peter Joseph Schunck died on July 13, 1960 in Heerlen.
3rd generation
The company reached its final heyday in the early 1960s under the direction of Peter's children Christine (born June 27, 1907 in Heerlen, † March 21, 2001 in Heerlen) and Leo (born April 12, 1910 in Heerlen, † February 22 2001 in Valkenburg) Schunck, at the same time as the height of coal mining, when more than 1,000 people were employed in several department stores in the Netherlands. In 1962 NV Wassen was taken over (formerly NV Kleedingbedrijven Wassen) with branches in Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam. On September 16, 1964, Schunck opened a new, larger shop on the newly built Promenade shopping street, with four times as much sales area. These two huge expenses did not get along with the closure of all mines as a result of the decline of the district at the end of the 1960s. The introduction of VAT in the Netherlands and the intended reduction in shop opening times on Saturdays also had a negative impact . Both of these factors made the department store increasingly unattractive for a large number of customers coming from across the near German border. In order to defuse the financially tense situation, some businesses were sold to the competition as well as to specialized companies. The Glass Palace, the company's landmark, was also sold. However, the search for solutions to the financial problems did not lead to any satisfactory result for those involved.
Christine Schunck tried to shrink the company healthily. She reduced it to the original textile and interior design division . Her brother Leo left the management. At the age of 65, she bought back the outstanding shares from her own assets and converted the company into a GmbH in July 1972. The banks made loans available for the circulation of goods. The furniture company Berden from Blerick rented more than 6000 m² of retail space in 1989 and in 1995 bought the whole company. They operated it for eleven years under the name Berden-Schunck, but since 2006 the name Schunck has no longer been part of the company name.
Web links
- aachen-webdesign.de Website in four languages about the Schunck family and the Glaspalast.
- Rijckheyt (Dutch), Leo Schunck's archive in the regional archive in Heerlen.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Center for Regional History in Heerlen ( Memento of the original from June 8, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Short version of the biography Arnold Schunck, een wever die zich handhaafde. In: Land van Herle 44 (1984), 1-12, from: PJA Schunck
- ↑ Directory of the archive of the Schunck family with pictures and history in the Heerlen city archive ( 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. (Dutch, PDF; 299 kB)
- ^ German translation and original of the article . Arnold Schunck, a weaver who held his own . Dutch original, published in: "HET LAND VAN HERLE" (history magazine for eastern South Limburg in the Netherlands), 34th year, No. 1 January / March. 1984.
