Word: otto
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...Otto OTTO GMBH...
...World War II, Werner Otto fled with his family to Hamburg from their Soviet-occupied home in what is now Poland. He won a license from the British authorities occupying the town to start a shoe factory, and in 1949 he founded a mail-order firm that is now the core of the family fortune. His son Michael was 28 when he joined the firm in 1971, and he became chairman a decade later. At the time, Otto Versand was a thriving German business with sales of about $2.5 billion. Today, recently renamed Otto GmbH & Co., it's a worldwide...
...Michael Otto, 59, has aggressively pushed to countries beyond Germany, including the U.S., where he has a majority stake in Crate & Barrel. (The family separately owns the Spiegel catalog group, which includes Spiegel, Eddie Bauer and Newport News, an online women's-clothing retailer.) Otto has also invested heavily in technology, including e-commerce, to improve efficiency, cut costs and reach out to customers. Last year the company turned a profit for the first time on its online sales, which reached $1.9 billion. Otto boasts that it's the second largest Internet retailer after Amazon.com The advantages of running...
...company has stopped selling products made of tropical wood and has undertaken a comprehensive--and costly--effort to ensure that many of the garments it sells are made of organically grown cotton (only natural fertilizers are used) or other environmentally correct materials. "I found it important to do this," Otto says, and since the family owns 85% of the company, there's nothing to stop...
...Buruma, nothing in modern Japan is completely Japanese. Even the myth of a divine Emperor, he contends, was assembled using imported parts. The old samurai who wrote Japan's first constitution in 1889 borrowed the nation-building blueprint of Europe's wiliest soldier, Otto von Bismarck, transforming Shintoism from a nature cult into a unifying national faith by grafting on German dogmas of military discipline and national essence...