Into the West German mails this week went 3,500,000 copies of a 400-page catalogue that will set off a long-distance shopping spree in homes from Bremerhaven to Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The catalogue is the latest and fattest from Frankfurt's Neckermann Mail Order House, offers Germans 5,500 items at prices as much as 40% lower than those of competing retail stores. This year, for the first time, the orders (averaging nearly 40,000 a day) will pour into a massive new steel and concrete headquarters now being taken over by the expanding firm. Built for Neckermann on a swamp on Frankfurt's outskirts, the complex covers some ten city blocks, contains one of Europe's largest buildings.
The man who will get more enjoyment than anyone out of the catalogue is hard-eyed, aggressive Joseph Neckermann, 47, founder and sole owner of the company.
In ten years he has singlehandedly changed the buying habits of millions of Germans, made his firm into the biggest mail order house in West Germany by cutting prices and battling other big merchandisers who tried to put him out of business. Today, Neckermann rules over an empire of 22 retail stores, 48 electrical appliance stores, 60 repair shops, more than 100 mobile repair units and 8,000 workers—and a 1959 gross of $132 million. All this has made Joseph Neckermann a millionaire: he lives in a 16-room Frankfurt mansion with his wife and three children, indulges his hobby of riding with a stable of prizewinners. To keep his empire humming, he works 12 hours a day, often sleeps on an office couch.
Cut-Rate Morality. Born in Wuerzburg, Neckermann started in business at 21 by buying a large lot of lamps and lampshades, assembling them himself, and selling them below the market price. Enraged competitors put him out of business by getting a court ruling that it was illegal to sell at cut-rate prices. Leaving Wuerzburg, Neckermann went off to Berlin.
There, as throughout Germany, hundreds of Jewish businessmen were being persecuted by the Nazis, forced to sell their businesses at ridiculously low prices to get enough cash to flee Germany. Always a man interested in a cut rate—whatever the moral implications—Neckermann took advantage of the forced sales to buy the mail order house of Carl Joel. As a big supplier to the military, Neckermann was exempted from military duty when World War II began, became a Nazi well connected in party circles. At war's end, the Allies sentenced him to a year's imprisonment for failure to divest himself of his properties; he caught tuberculosis in jail, went to a refugee camp to recover.
There Neckermann recognized the opportunity for a comeback in the huge market created by the influx of millions of refugees, who needed almost everything, were usually far from shopping centers.
In 1950 he scraped together $25,000, sent out a crude, twelve-page catalogue of wearing apparel to 250,000 refugees picked from card indexes. His prices were aimed at the low-budget housewife—and the housewives liked what they got. Within eight months Neckermann was doing a $2.4 million a year business.