Thanks to clever marketing of ten-penny baking powder sachets and early diversification, August Oetker's pharmacy became one of Germany's largest companies in 130 years. After the Oetker Group was split up in the summer of 2021, its future is open. The year 1891 promises to be a good one. On January 1, 29-year-old pharmacist Dr. August Oetker takes over the "Aschoff'sche Apotheke" at Niedernstrasse 3 in Bielefeld, having borrowed the money from his mother-in-law and the bank. His wife, Karoline, supported the natural scientist and son of a master baker and took care of their two-year-old son Rudolf. August Oetker promised "to serve everyone who honors my bakery with his trust to the best of his ability. His first own formulations were...

The Swiss Ueli Prager was the first to bring luxury to the plates of ordinary people. Within four and a half decades, Mövenpick has become a global group with over 106 restaurants, 33 hotels, ice cream and wine trading. And a very strong brand name. It is an almost fateful lunch break that the 30-year-old officer Ueli Prager, known as UP, spends in the Aargau barracks in the summer of 1946. In the noon edition of the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung" he reads the construction announcement of the Claridenhof office building behind the Zurich Kongresshaus. "2,500 people in one block," he reflects, "they'll be hungry." Wouldn't that be an ideal location for a new restaurant - targeting the hurried city dweller who wants to eat well in passing, so to...

Jake Burton Carpenter revolutionized winter sports in a small barn in 1977. He made snowboarding a trendy sport and set off a worldwide boom. Today, his company is still the world market leader with a 32 percent market share and $200 million in sales. His fondest childhood memory is a vacation in the Bromley Mountains. In 1961, six-year-old Jake Burton Carpenter from Long Island stood on skis and experienced for the first time the exhilaration that body control and speed can cause. As a 14-year-old student, he discovers the "snurfer" - a simple board with a rope at the tip. "It had been around since the 1920s, but the manufacturer sold it as a ten-dollar toy, not as a piece of sports equipment," he recounted. In fact, it's not much of...

In 1908, Berlin florist Max Hübner revolutionized the flower trade with the "Blumenspenden-Vermittlungs-Vereinigung. In 112 years, this has become the unlisted Fleurop AG, in which 5,000 German Fleurop florists each hold a single share. That Amazon founder Jeff Bezos knows this story is unlikely. A pity, actually. Because Berlin's Max Hübner could have been his role model. Max was born in December 1866 into rosy times. The family lived in a prestigious building on Prinzenstrasse in Kreuzberg, and the flower store of his parents Theodor and Alwine Hübner flourished on the first floor. The order books are full. Urbanization pushes nurseries to the unpopulated outskirts of the city and flower stores experience their heyday: Restaurants, cafés,...

Theodor Stiebel founded a small factory for immersion heaters in Berlin in 1924 - he was driven to develop products with low energy consumption. Today, the company has over 3700 employees and generates sales of more than 500 million euros. And energy efficiency is its brand essence. The year was 1923, when the engineer from Braunschweig was looking for an alternative to the error-prone piston immersion boilers. His solution is a handy device with a ring-shaped hollow cylinder and a wall thickness of three millimeters. The advantage is that this small immersion heater heats up quickly and cools down again quickly, thus saving energy. Theodor calls the device a ring immersion heater and asks his uncle Carl if he could produce some models...

Paul Schmidt's invention has been shining for almost 120 years. With his batteries for flashlights and bicycle lights, the Berlin entrepreneur made energy mobile and light transportable. From a tinkerer who was once at the top and at the bottom again. Paul Schmidt had the brilliant idea on a cosy Sunday morning, at home in the kitchen of all places. His wife Henriette Auguste Franziska Laura was pouring milk onto flour. Immediately the liquid is absorbed, a solid mass is formed. Paul sees this, storms out of the kitchen and runs to his "Elektrotechnische Anstalt von Paul Schmidt". For some time now, the 28-year-old Berliner-by-choice has been looking for a way to make light transportable. But nothing really works, back in 1896. Could...