The entrepreneur Günther Fielmann is dead. The founder of the optician chain of the same name died on Wednesday at the age of 84 in his home town of Lütjensee in Schleswig-Holstein, as the company announced. He fell asleep peacefully surrounded by his family.
Fielmann, who was born in Stafstedt near Rendsburg in Schleswig-Holstein as the son of a teacher, actually wanted to become a photographer. But then he gave in to his father’s urging and became an apprentice to an optician. In 1972 he opened his first specialist shop in Cuxhaven.
During this time, the industry lived in a land of milk and honey and made profits of up to 300 percent. For the customers, however, it wasn’t funny. Beautiful glasses were available for private customers, while health insurance patients had the ugly “health insurance glasses” pushed onto their noses, which Fielmann soon called “the blunder of discrimination”. He was content with smaller profit margins and discovered his opportunity to offer nice glasses at low prices to those who didn’t earn as much, pensioners, students and welfare recipients.
In 2019, Fielmann withdrew from the company’s board of directors
Over the course of more than 45 years, Fielmann built his company into the leading optician in Germany. There is now a branch of his chain in almost every pedestrian zone. Fielmann AG had a total of 977 branches at home and abroad, more than 22,000 employees and 27 million customers at the end of March 2023. Annual sales were most recently (2022) at almost 1.8 billion euros.
In 2019, Günther Fielmann retired from the company’s board at the age of 80. His son Marc Fielmann took over the chairmanship of the stock corporation alone. The father, up to that point the oldest CEO of a listed stock corporation in Germany, had previously largely withdrawn from operational business.
Fielmann will be remembered by his family and employees “as a pioneer in ophthalmic optics with his customer-oriented philosophy, his creativity and his visionary spirit,” the company announced after the founder’s death.