Helmut Schlotterer hands over Marc Cain to employee foundation
Cassidy STEPHENS
While people in Bodelshausen are looking forward to the brand’s 50th anniversary and the fashion party on August 31, company founder Helmut Schlotterer has made a surprising decision: After all the disruptions with the board over the past five years, he has decided to settle his succession and with it the future of Marc Cain.
Schlotterer has opted for an unusal succession plan. Instead of selling the company to external investors or to another company, he is putting it in the hands of his employees. This “innovative approach” is intended to secure Marc Cain’s DNA in the long term and ensure that the company’s vision and values continue to be lived out, according to a statement from Bodelshausen.
The employees has been given the opportunity to actively participate in the success of the company and to determine the use of profits with their voting rights.
At an emotional internal company event, Schlotterer announced his succession plan, which is to redefine the future of the company. To this end, the fashion entrepreneur has decided to bequeath his business and private assets to his Helmut Schlotterer Foundation.
By establishing an employee foundation, the voting rights in his company are to be placed in the hands of his employees. This body is to be led by an employee council consisting of all active managers.
This “courageous step after more than 50 years at the top” will undoubtedly go down as a milestone in Marc Cain’s corporate history and will have a positive impact on the entire workforce.
“It is important to me, more than anything, that Marc Cain be passed into the right hands. Selling the company was never an option for me and since my wife and I don’t have any children, I decided to set up foundations to continue the company. The idea of an employee foundation is new and has never been done in this form before. But I am firmly convinced that this is the right way to continue Marc Cain in my sense and in the sense of the employees. An important aspect is also the safeguarding of the production site in Germany, Bodelshausen,” Schlotterer comments personally on the decision.
