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Larger than life: Friedrich Knapp
has created a highly profitable global corporation using unusual methods.
Small problem: Without the shy entrepreneur, he is hardly able to survive.
Illustration: Tim McDonagh for manager magazin. Photo template: Chris Rügge / Textilwirtschaft / picture-alliance
For some it is the city's White House, one of the most important sights in Braunschweig, for others it is simply a place of horror, the "Adolf Hitler House". Shortly after the city gave Hitler the German passport, the NSDAP moved into the massive, two-story sandstone block building. Today the former Villa Rimpau belongs to a man shrouded in mystery who describes himself as a "simple person" and "not the smartest" and yet has created the most profitable trading group in the republic far from public perception: Friedrich Georg Knapp (70).
1150 branches, 46 countries, 19,000 employees.
With cheap clothes for young people, New Yorker makes around two billion euros and achieves pre-tax returns of over 16 percent, as much as the role model for the entire industry, the Zara parent company Inditex.
New Yorker is essentially a one-man show, the creature of one of the country's most bizarre patriarchs, as ingenious as it is feared.
Nobody can replace someone like him - and that is exactly the problem.
Shortly after 8 a.m., a black Rolls-Royce leaves Braunschweig's most famous villa and after around ten kilometers comes to a stop directly in front of the entrance to the New York headquarters. Since the bodyguard fell ill, Knapp has been moving his collection of noble bodies himself. Once out of the car and straightened up, "Fritz", as friends call him, is an imposing figure: two meters tall and weighs over 120 kilograms.
In short sweatpants, a T-shirt and espadrilles, he shuffles a few meters across the corridor and sits down in the canteen.
Sometimes he sits there all morning.
Always there: his assistant Jonas Gnauck, the only one who is allowed to park his car, an Audi, directly behind him.
And one of the very few to whom Knapp treats the color black.
The rest of the management has to be content with silver-colored cars.
The boss himself determines the color theory. Who is important and who is not can be seen in the parking lot.
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