Eyewear king and organic farmer Günther Fielmann is dead
Published: Friday, Jan 5th 2024, 12:01
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"Glasses? Fielmann!" - Almost everyone in Germany knows this advertising slogan. The entrepreneur Günther Fielmann created Germany's largest optician chain from virtually nothing. Now the dedicated founder and organic farmer has died at the age of 84. He passed away peacefully surrounded by his family, the Fielmann Group announced on Friday.
Fielmann remained CEO until 2019, most recently together with his son Marc. In the last years of his career, Günther Fielmann fulfilled his heart's desire and gradually handed over the reins to his son. He did not want a non-family manager at the helm and wanted to keep his life's work in the family.
After the change, he largely withdrew from the public eye, devoting himself primarily to organic farming and breeding horses, cattle and sheep on his three farms in Schleswig-Holstein. The entrepreneur always saw himself as a nature-loving country man - even if he did enjoy driving a Ferrari.
"Life in the country has shaped me," he said in a book on his 75th birthday. "Even as a child, I dreamed of having my own farm."
Empire created out of nothing
Born in Schleswig-Holstein, he created his empire with more than 1,000 branches and around 23,000 employees from nothing. After an unremarkable post-war youth, an optician's apprenticeship and a career start as an employee, Fielmann opened his first store in Cuxhaven, Lower Saxony, in 1972 at the age of 33.
This was something of a big bang in the sleepy optician industry, which was disinterested in innovation. Fielmann made do with a lower margin, cut out the middleman, gave customers guarantees - the young entrepreneur focused strictly on the customer. "You are the customer" was Fielmann's motto.
The final breakthrough came in 1981, when Fielmann took away the health insurance companies' prescription glasses and replaced them with a variety of modern models. "Until then, everyone who wore glasses had to wear proof of their low income on their nose," recalled Fielmann. Health insurance glasses were reimbursed, those who wanted more had to pay - traditional opticians achieved margins of up to 30 percent.
In 1982, Fielmann opened its first Super-Center in Kiel, a new dimension of optical store with 7,000 pairs of glasses. In the 1980s, the Fielmann chain reached a size where not every large new opening threatened the existence of the company.
Going public in 1994
This was followed by the IPO in 1994 and expansion abroad, although this remained modest and focused mainly on Switzerland and Austria. At times, Fielmann had bigger plans in Europe, but they never amounted to much.
It was only when son Marc joined the Management Board in 2015 that the expansion gained momentum, particularly south of the Alps in northern Italy and Slovenia. The company is debt-free, highly liquid and more than 70 percent family-owned. Fielmann has long been not only a retailer and craftsman, but also a manufacturer of glasses with a production center in Rathenow, Brandenburg.
In addition to his entrepreneurial successes, Fielmann has also become involved as an organic farmer. More than 2,300 organic products are on sale in the farm store at Hof Lütjensee. With the other farms Hof Ritzerau and Gut Schierensee in Kiel, where Fielmann also lived, he farmed more than 2000 hectares of land. Fielmann also bought and renovated Plön Castle, where opticians are trained for the entire industry.
Large dispenser
"There is also a world besides optics," he once told the newspaper Welt am Sonntag. Fielmann donated a lot - to education, science and culture, ecology and nature conservation. He gave his employees shares in the company and has planted a tree for each of them every year since 1986 - more than 1.7 million trees and shrubs to date. For his services, the state of Schleswig-Holstein made him an honorary citizen, a rare distinction.
Building up his company meant a lot of work and there was not much time for private life. The company founder married late at the age of 48 and had children. He met his wife Heike Fielmann, to whom he was married for almost 13 years, at the Fielmann head office, where the then 19-year-old student was earning some extra money as an eyewear model.
The age gap to his son Marc was 50 years, and even longer to his daughter Sophie-Luise. Fielmann later publicly regretted having become a father late in life. However, the handover to the next generation was successful in good time.
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