Buxtehude / Sylt (TEH) – Kay Gosebeck has been selling beach chairs for 16 years – he has never experienced what happens in the corona crisis. “With us, the land is under, we are killed with orders,” says the 62-year-old founder of the beach chair manufacturer Buxtehude. He currently counts almost 4,000 clicks a day on the website of the Lower Saxony company.
“People have a lot of time, they are sitting at the PC.” From every second customer, Gosebeck heard on the phone: “”The holiday has been canceled and instead we would like to have a beach chair in the garden or on the balcony.” Because of the pandemic, the islands on the North and Baltic Seas are taboo for vacationers. And Gosebeck had to close the store a few weeks ago. “A world went down for us on Monday. March, April, May are the three months in which we drive 50 percent of our annual sales.
But the very next day we noticed that they were busy with online orders. ” It was the best March since the company was founded, and all production employees are currently employed on Sylt, in the beach chair manufacture in Rantum. The order situation is still good, says André Moller, son-in-law of the company owner while walking through the company. In the large warehouse, there are over 1000 beach chairs that the manufacturer rents to hotels, restaurants and holiday apartments in winter.
Now the hall is almost empty. In the workshops, the employees of the manufactory are making new beach chairs. About five are built in the factory each day. 70 percent of the production traditionally goes to the mainland – to Bavaria, the Rhineland and the Frankfurt area, for example. “Most beach chairs go to private individuals,” says Moller. They wanted to take something with them from their favorite island, is that also true in the Corona crisis, in which Sylt is moving beyond reach? “It is already being ordered quite well online,” says Svenja Moller-Trautmann, Moller’s wife. The carpenter is currently assembling a lower part of a beach chair.
But you can already tell that walking customers are missing. Many wanted to choose their material on-site, touch it once, try it out, she says. Individual wishes would be taken into account: A customer once wanted to have seat heating installed, as Moller-Trautmann explains. “If you spend 2000 euros, you want to sit in the beach chair beforehand,” says Gosebeck in Buxtehude. Ten hours of work was in one of his beach chairs. 160 basketwork workers worked in a plant in Indonesia – one basket takes around six hours. This was followed by two hours of carpentry work.
Sewing, upholstery, and cutting are being carried out in Buxtehude, which currently employs almost 50 people, and the Bris beach chair manufacturer in Ahrensbok in Schleswig-Holstein is also seeing increased demand. “It’s insane, people sit at home and can’t go on vacation,” says owner Angelo Bris. “You decide to buy a beach chair to have at least a little bit of the Baltic or North Sea in your garden.” The products are almost completely sold out. “Surely the demand is unbroken,” says Lars Eggers from the beach chair manufacturer of the same name in Molln. “But it is also due to the season that most people now simply think of a beach chair.”
Martin Bockler from the Lower Saxony Chamber of Commerce and Industry names other possible beneficiaries of the crisis, although the number of those affected negatively is significantly higher. Products in demand are children’s toys and books, IT equipment for the home office and home fitness equipment. Manufacturers could not always meet the demand that there were supply bottlenecks with headsets. “We work twelve hours a day, some work here on Saturday,” explains Gosebeck. Shifts are also planned over Easter. Bris Beach Basket Manufacture Rantum Beach Basket Manufacture Buxtehude Beach Basket Manufacture
