Friday, May 28, 2021
Picard boss in an interview
“Our bank wanted to get rid of us”
The traditional company Picard has a true odyssey behind it – and was saved by family and friends with a million dollar loan after bankruptcy. Georg Picard, managing director in the fourth generation, reports on the struggle for survival.
For Picard, the Corona crisis was a battle on several fronts: The retail trade was closed for months. Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof, where the leather bag manufacturer generates the lion’s share of its sales, was itself in trouble, hardly anyone could be found at airports – and hardly anyone needed new luggage. “Except for the online pillar, everything collapsed,” says managing director Georg Picard, describing the time of the first lockdown in the podcast “Zero Hour”.
In May 2020, Picard went into protective shield proceedings. The struggle for a restart and survival was particularly intense – because the only house bank did not play along. “We had the feeling for two or three years that she wanted to get rid of us,” says Picard, who has been running the company from Obertshausen in Hesse since 2015 in the fourth generation. It was apparently a matter of getting rid of everything “that belongs to the retail industry in any way.” That’s why he is “pretty stinky”.
In order to save the traditional brand, Georg Picard had to make tough decisions: The company parted with 50 of the 150 employees in Obertshausen, and those made redundant were transferred to a transfer company. Picard also sold the company premises. A “wonderful green space, that hurts, of course,” said the 48-year-old. “That was pulled up here with employees in 1949.”
After the start of the insolvency proceedings in August, Georg Picard succeeded in a tough process in maintaining the traditional company with loans from family members and friends – without government aid or investors. “Now we have a very stable and healthy economic situation in which we can live well for the next two years,” said Picard. “If we don’t do a lot wrong.”
The bankruptcy process was arduous, because the court in Offenbach was “incredibly slow”, complains Picard. The creditors’ meeting could only take place shortly before Christmas, and the process lasted until February of this year. “We have lost customers and suppliers as a result.”
In order to be better positioned in the future, the company has changed its strategy: more online and fewer physical stores. Of the brand’s 14 shops, five were closed; only the airport stores will remain.
In the future, Georg Picard would like to put handicraft in the foreground – for example through a glass factory. “Some of the craft are now extinct, or nobody knows how it works,” he says. “This curiosity of people to see how something physical grows together that you may not even be able to do yourself is unbroken.”
Hear in the new episode of “The Zero Hour”:
- Why Georg Picard meditates several times a week
- How he convinced a friend to give the company some money
- Which new articles the brand has in preparation
You can find all episodes directly at Audio Now, Apple or Spotify or via Google.
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