30 years Pearl-Versand: In the realm of cheap gadgets

Steel gondolas shimmy along steel struts with a shrill whistle. In tin containers dangle oil lamps, sweatbands and LED lamps. A fan blows moist bearing air onto the back of a postal transporter. It smells of damp cardboard boxes as Christian Allinger makes his way through the high-bay warehouse. He has put his white polo shirt deep in the jeans, on his wrist he wears an Apple Watch.

In the shipping halls of Pearl, this is a relatively expensive device. Because there store smartwatches that cost 40 euros instead of 400 euros. But Allinger is allowed to wear the noble gadget. The 48-year-old has been loyal to the German mail order company for 26 years. He works as an authorized officer at the Südbaden company, which turns 30 on September 6. "This is like a family for me," says Allinger. The fact that the family has become quite big by now does not change that.

Jörg Breithut

Christian Allinger has been working for Pearl for 26 years.

When he started working for Pearl at the beginning of the 1990s, he had personally known all 30 employees, says Allinger, the company was then based in a former auto repair shop. Allinger took care of PC software, Pearl's former core business. At that time, he managed trial software that was dubbed on floppy disks and glued onto notebooks such as the "DOS Trend". Allinger hired testers to select the right shareware.

Gadgets were still in short supply at these times. In addition to software, the order books listed only products such as scanners, sound cards and modems.

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Blue and yellow building blocks

With meanwhile about 500 coworkers in completely Germany Allinger can not remember all names today. Even with the garage of yesteryear, today's Pearl headquarters in the 3000-inhabitant village Buggingen has nothing to do. The buildings tower like giant blue-and-yellow sheet metal blocks from the maize fields in the green Rhine valley between the Vosges and the Black Forest. Inside, young women and men scurry through a high-bay warehouse, which is divided into three stations: picker, putter and packer.

Just like in Amazon department stores, the chaos reigns here: The products are not stored in groups on the high shelves, but are stored according to a self-programmed algorithm where there are gaps. The warehouse workers do not know what they are about to get off the shelves, but only where the product is. This saves space.

Jörg Breithut

The mail order company has around 16,000 items in its range

The shipping process begins with the pickers wearing bulky, pocket-sized scanners on their wrists. Black and white displays show where fascia balls, electric blankets and smartphones are located. The pickers pick up the goods from the shelves and place them in gondolas that drive to the putters.

Meanwhile, a software calculates the packet size and tells the putters about a multilingual computer voice in the headphones, how the gadgets must be packed. When the package is full, it is fed with cardboard in the packing station, sealed and sent to the post office in Lahr.

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The business with PC hardware

With the PC-craft boom of the nineties Pearl started golden times. The catalog became compulsory reading for computer geeks. If you wanted to save on floppy boxes, CD burners and bullets, you ordered in Buggingen. The business of cheap-produced gadgets picked up speed.

To this day, Pearl has largely renounced branded products, ordered goods in the Far East and sold the assortment under the names of 120 own brands. Manuals are written by the employees themselves, they pay attention to the CE seal and EU standards.

Much electronics is still in the range, but junkware such as cuckoo clocks, telescopic candle extinguishers and tub plant bags is on the rise. The profit margin is larger with such products, it is said. The goods are marketed via their own TV channel and the traditional catalog with a circulation of ten million copies.

To this day, many female models are printed, even on the front page. The covergirls are controversial within the company. But experiments with men's photos, even with celebrities like Harald Schmidt, were simply not convincing according to market analyzes, they say.

Off Amazon on the market

For about ten years, Pearl has been keeping its sales stable at around 150 million euros per year. At peak times, the company sends up to 100,000 consignments per day from its 16,000-item assortment from four warehouses in Germany. But in comparison with the US competition, the big growth is missing. The sales of Amazon - more than 200 billion euros per year - makes the once-gadget giants do not look so huge.

The market power lies with the US company, there is no doubt about that, says Sandra Wursthorn, Managing Director at Pearl. "Amazon sets the pace." Pearl was even earlier in terms of gadgets and operated in 1996 an online store for it, while Amazon still sold only books.

But you do not see Amazon as an enemy, it is said by Pearl, but jump on the success with on. Pearl joined the sellers at Amazon's Marketplace and sells his articles there. "We try to stay on the ball, and Amazon does not want to leave the field without a fight," says Wursthorn.

After his tour, Christian Allinger leaves the warehouse through the anti-theft lock. That is unfortunately necessary, says the authorized officer. A little later Allinger tells that he has already looked around at Amazon. "We do not need to hide," he says. However, the next step to automation is probably not as fast as the US model. "It will take some time for robots to take over the warehouse completely."