Walter Seidensticker (entrepreneur)

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Walter Seidensticker Sr. (* May 22, 1895 in Brackwede near Bielefeld ; † 1969 ) was a German manufacturer and founder of one of the most famous German shirt manufacturers, the textile office Walter Seidensticker in Bielefeld.

Life

Walter Seidensticker in the year the company was founded in 1919.

Walter Seidensticker was born in 1895 into a Bielefeld glassmaker family. His father was the master glassworker Emil Seidensticker. After attending primary school from 1901 to 1909 and a subsequent three-year apprenticeship as a linen cutter, Seidensticker was wounded several times as a front-line soldier during the First World War. Unemployed after the end of the war, Seidensticker founded a small underwear manufacturing company in his parents' house in Brackwede, Westphalia, in 1919: the Seidensticker Herrenwäschefabriken GmbH. Sole owner of the company since 1930, Seidensticker has continuously taken over and founded other linen factories, including Franken & Co. GmbH, Standard Bielefelder Brille GmbH, Dt. Herrenwäschefabriken Dornbusch & Co. GmbH, Ursula Modische Brille GmbH in Brackwede, Alpenland Sportwashing GmbH in Sonthofen and Seidensticker Linen Factory GmbH in Innsbruck (today Seidensticker Austria).

During the Second World War, Seidenstickers shirt factories - like the entire textile industry - were affected by a scarcity of resources. During the war years, Seidensticker mainly produced uniforms and work clothes for the German Wehrmacht, as well as camouflage fabrics and Eastern workers' shirts. After the first Allied bombing raids on Bielefeld in the summer of 1940, Walter Seidensticker relocated large parts of the production to a newly acquired plant in Winterberg near the Czech border. While the main factory in Bielefeld was destroyed by three bombs in autumn 1944, Seidensticker was able to continue production in Winterberg immediately after the end of the war.

Not least thanks to the outsourcing of large parts of the production facilities during the war, Walter Seidensticker succeeded in rebuilding his company quickly after 1945. After the restoration of the Bielefeld production facilities and a major appearance at the export fair in Hanover in 1948 , the company was renamed "Textilkontor Walter Seidensticker, Bielefeld". In 1953 Seidenstickers Textilkontor was already one of the largest manufacturers of men's underwear in Europe with a total workforce of 1,600 and was considered a leader in the underwear industry. At the beginning of the 1960s, Seidensticker was already producing at 20 different locations and in 1965 opened its first branch outside Germany in Tarragona, Spain ; Soon afterwards, large parts of the shirt production were relocated to Asia. Seidensticker attracted international attention in the mid-1960s with the production of the first non-iron shirts, which were made from "Diolen Star", a blend of cotton and polyester and are considered a breakthrough in the history of the textile industry. The black rose, which Seidensticker had sewn onto the revolutionary cotton Diolen shirts for marketing reasons, soon became the trademark of his company.

Walter Seidensticker was considered an expert in highly developed industrial engineering, efficient production methods and socially exemplary workspace design. In 1930 he was one of the first entrepreneurs in his branch to use cyclic conveyor belts in production and thus became a pioneer of manufacturing methods based on the division of labor in laundry production. After his death in 1969, his sons Gerd (1931–2017) and Walter jun. (1929–2015) who joined the company's management in the 1950s.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Karl Ritter von Klimesch (Ed.): Heads of politics, business, art and science, LZ . Publisher Johann Wilhelm Naumann, Augsburg 1953.
  2. ↑ a b Seidensticker - a success story. Retrieved November 23, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Walter Habel (Ed.): Who is who? The German Who's Who, Vol. 1 (West) . Arani-Verl., Berlin 1967, p. 1858 .
  4. ↑ a b c d e Heidi Hagen-Pekdemir: 100 years of Seidensticker: The traditional company's path to success. Retrieved November 23, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Julia Schnaus: Clothing attracts everyone: The German clothing industry 1918 to 1973 . De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin / Boston 2017, p. 244 .
  6. ↑ 35 years ago Seidensticker presented the shirt with the black rose: the pioneer of the non-iron. Retrieved November 23, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Seidensticker, Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Seidensticker, Walter sen.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German manufacturer
DATE OF BIRTH May 22, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Brackwede near Bielefeld
DATE OF DEATH 1969