With Douglas, Hamburg began to smell

On January 5, 1821, Scotsman John Sharp Douglas opened the first soap factory in Hamburg. With his work, he lays the foundation for Europe's largest perfumery chain. 200 years later, the Corona crisis puts a massive damper on the company.

by Dirk Hempel

29-year-old John Sharp Douglas, who brought the fresh scents to the maze of streets in Hamburg's Gängeviertel a good 200 years ago, studied chemistry in Glasgow and worked as a soapmaker for a while. But then the taxes are too high for him and he leaves his homeland. He arrives in the Hanseatic city, where his uncle owns a pub, on one of the first steamers to travel the Elbe.

Water and soap instead of dry hygiene

Douglas is a pioneer at a time when very few people practice personal hygiene regularly. They only know soap for cleaning clothes, as coarse curd and soft soap. They rub their skin with dry cloths because they have believed since the Middle Ages that water can transmit the plague. Those who have money cover up bad odors with fragrant essences and powders.

But times are changing. English doctors have long promoted the health benefits of water, especially by the sea. And in Germany there are already the first seaside resorts in Norderney and Cuxhaven, where drinking and cleansing cures are supposed to clean and refresh people. And after the oppressive years of occupation by Napoleon's troops, the people of Hamburg want to enjoy life again.

The Scot relies on exotic raw materials

So Douglas has the right instincts as he turns his kilns and kettles on to produce fine personal soaps. The Elbe washes away the sewage, and the port of Hamburg supplies it with the exotic raw materials - coconut and palm oil from Asia, fragrances and oils from the tropics. Douglas elevates soap making to an art. His fine toilet soaps are very popular with the wealthy Hanseatic citizens and their wives. However, for the workers and their families in the Ganges Quarter, they are unaffordable.

Douglas' invention changes soap making

He earns good money, is granted Hamburg citizenship and marries an innkeeper's daughter from St. Pauli, with whom he has six children. And he revolutionized soap production in 1830:With a mixture of coconut oil and soda, which heats up itself quickly and no longer has to be boiled, he reduces production from five days to two hours. This greatly reduces costs and makes fine soap affordable for the less well-to-do.

Douglas started marketing early

In order to stand out from the growing competition, which his soap imitates, he keeps inventing new products, such as the "Chinese Heaven Soap", with a fine and stiff foam, which is particularly suitable for shaving and bathing and which he claims the recipe comes from Imperial court in Beijing. He relies on beautiful packaging and prominent advertising, for which he wins the famous Weimar court doctor Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, who has already treated Goethe and Schiller. And he sets up his own shop next to the factory to facilitate the distribution of the products.

Sales manager takes over after Douglas' death

His soaps win awards at trade shows and the company grows. In 1842, Douglas moved into a larger factory on Carolinstrasse in St. Pauli. But at the peak of success, he suddenly dies. Because his sons are still minors, a shop steward takes over:Theodor Hopff had previously organized the distribution of the soap and drove from dealer to dealer.

The Pasha's Secret Recipe

Hopff is now modernizing production, experimenting with new ingredients and expanding the product range. For example, he puts an "Egyptian toilet soap" in the program, allegedly the private soap of the Pasha of Egypt, and also provides a story that is effective in advertising:"Our acquaintance with senior English officers of the armies involved in the last Egyptian war led through unspeakable troubles and Monetary sacrifice to get the real recipe of this peculiar soap."

The sons take over

After Thomas, son of Douglas, spent ten years learning from other well-known soap manufacturers abroad and his brother Alexander trained as a businessman, the two founding sons continued to expand the company’s international connections from 1863 onwards. Under the company name J. S. Douglas Söhne, they hire an English boiling master and a chemist from Paris. They relocated the factory to Kleine Schäferkamp in Eimsbüttel, where soap and perfume were manufactured until the mid-1990s.

In the empire, founded in 1871, the economy is booming and the soap blocks are now mass-produced. But just a few years later, the brothers sold their company in 1879 to the two Hamburg merchants Gustav Adolph Hinrich Runge and Johann Adolph Kolbe. The new owners also run their own salesroom near the town hall for a few years, where they also stock other toiletries - pomade from France, beard wax from Hungary and hair tonic from Florida.

In 1910, two sisters founded the Douglas perfumery

But a new era only begins when the enterprising sisters Maria and Anna Carstens the soap manufacturers persuaded them to sell the cosmetic products from Eimsbüttel as well as exclusive soaps, perfume oils, creams and powders on the elegant Neuer Wall - under the name Perfumery Douglas. In these years after the turn of the century, women everywhere are becoming more self-confident, more emancipated. They fight for the right to study, to work, and to appear in public. This also includes the business with the outside:Elisabeth Arden, for example, opens a beauty salon in New York, Coco Chanel opens her first boutique in Paris.

In Hamburg, the Carsten sisters benefit from the new trend. The largest perfumery chain in Europe will develop from its store on Neuer Wall, which will be represented in Europe with around 2,400 branches in 2020 after a few changes of ownership.

Corona crisis forces branches to be closed

Then, however, the lockdown measures in the corona pandemic left clear traces in the hitherto successful branch model. At the end of January 2021, one year after the first Corona case in Germany, the perfumery company announced that it wanted to close every fifth branch in Europe - around 500 shops. In Germany, around 60 of more than 430 branches are said to be affected. Douglas is reacting to the fact that online sales, which grew rapidly during the Corona crisis, were not able to offset the massive losses in on-site business in the 2019/2020 financial year. The bottom line is that the company has to digest a three-digit million minus - and around 2,500 of the total of 20,000 employees the announced job loss.