A very warm welcome to MEISSEN®!

Dear Madam, Dear Sir,
Dear Friends of the MEISSEN® Manufactory,

The MEISSEN® Manufactory successfully positioned itself as a global-outreach Luxury & Lifestyle group in 2012.

Driven by our founding spirit, today we again see ourselves as a house of art and hand-produced luxury whose creations are set apart by a supreme devotion to style and quality as well as embodying 300 years of European art and culture from Meissen. Thus it is that we create unique objects of desire additionally distinguished by lasting worth.

The Group’s principal brand worlds

  • MEISSEN® HOME® and MEISSEN HOME® deco
  • MEISSEN® Joaillerie and
  • MEISSEN® Fine Art & artCAMPUS

now enjoy a clear and high profile in the marketplace. We have revamped our existing ranges and geared them to the requirements of today’s global market by dint of a wealth of innovations. These include, for instance, our new MEISSEN® Cosmopolitan tableware & accessories, just as they do our new candleholders & table lamps, our new Royal Blossoms jewellery collection or, indeed, our new silk accessories. New products of this kind have enabled us to tap new target groups whilst also being very well received by loyal customers of long standing. I would like to thank you very much for this!

Our new MEISSEN® franchise distribution concepts have a crucial part to play in further advancing our growth in an intensely competitive international market environment. They will allow us to win partners throughout the world who can join with us in building up the various MEISSEN® brand worlds and hence also our distribution network. This is the only means of redressing the distinct imbalance of forces between ourselves - a State-owned Manufactory - and our far more highly capitalised, privately financed rivals in the luxury segment.

  • In the latter half of 2012, for instance, we began opening MEISSEN® Joaillerie boutiques in our domestic German market that already bear the traits of our new Joaillerie franchise scheme, specifically in the cities of Meissen, Stuttgart, Hamburg and Nuremberg. I cordially invite you to visit these new MEISSEN® brand worlds.
  • Shortly before Christmas 2012, we opened our first MEISSEN HOME® deco boutique under the new HOME® deco franchise concept at the Kaufhaus des Westens store in Berlin, which has gone down really well.
  • Many of our core customers have also, to conclude, made the journey to Milan to experience our VILLA MEISSEN® - the franchise scheme for our MEISSEN® HOME® world - at first hand and to draw inspiration from the interior designs on offer there.

We will be continuing down this path in 2013 with the aim of establishing a select network of high-performing trade-stockist & franchise partners in Germany and the wider world.

Our new international sales companies - MEISSEN® Italia in Milan, MEISSEN® Asia-Pacific in Hong-Kong and, coming shortly, MEISSEN® UK in London - plus our exclusive regional partner MEISSEN® Middle East&North Africa in the Lebanon will be intensively driving this development forward in their respective key growth regions and, as guarantors of a brand aspiration dating back more than 300 years, will ensure the high quality of our products and services at close proximity to our international partners and customers.

At the same time, we are working intensively on further optimising processes and logistics at our company. We are convinced that the superlative quality that has made us famous the world over, most notably in the sphere of fine art - or, to put it in clockmakers’ terms, the sphere of our “multi-complications”, our “tourbillons of porcelain art” - can only be achieved at our home location of Meissen. We are thus consciously shying away from making potentially significant savings by having our products made in Asia. Instead, we are investing in our production facilities in Germany in order to retain and build upon the high level of qualification of our Manufactory staff by means, for instance, of the newly established master class for sculptural porcelain art under the artistic directorship of our sculptor-in-chief Jörg Danielczyk.

Our history, dear Friends of the MEISSEN® Manufactory, is a unique one. Our new products are as unique as those drawn from our age-old tradition. Equipped with our new HOME, HOME® deco, Joaillerie & Fine Art brands and worlds of experience, we now also have in our hands the very key to continued international expansion and hence also to lastingly safeguarding the jobs of our Manufactory staff together with our famous brand, which are, after all, what it is ultimately all about.

It is now a question of finding campaigners of the best and most dependable kind who wish to join forces with us in keeping jobs, the brand and our very history alive - including by committing capital expenditure to these ideals.

  • So we can continue enthralling the world with stylish luxury and things of great beauty as a broad-based Luxury & Lifestyle group against competition from Italian, French, English (and, of course, the important Swiss) luxury groups, effectively serving as an ambassador for Saxony and the whole of Germany (in a contemporary form of the once all-decisive grand style).
  • So Wikipedia, the interactive encyclopaedia on the Internet, is no longer confined to stating that the MEISSEN® Manufactory experienced its finest hour in the 18th century.

And, last but not least:

  • So we can preserve our tradition and cultural heritage for future generations too - not as a mere museum venture but as the living enterprise of Augustus the Strong.

In this spirit I would like, on behalf of all executives and staff at the Manufactory, to thank all our customers and partners for sticking with us in this challenging phase of reorganisation. We are jointly in the process not only of tending the Meissen legacy but also, in view of the crises and challenges that confront us today, of acting to bring about root-and-branch change in order that everything can remain as it always has been. For over 300 years.

 

Kind Regards,

Dr Christian Kurtzke
Chief Executive Officer