Ravensburger

Vision 2010: We will be the leader in quality in our markets. We will be at the top in our areas of business. Be a successful European group of companies and remain independent. With our excellent products and services for entertainment and education, we will promote self-development as well as communication and cooperation within families and society. By working together, the management and the employees are responsible for the material and intellectual achievements and will contribute to and will be a part of the net product to the company. Otto Maier Verlag survives World War II undamaged and receives a publishing license. Ravensburger AG is a publisher based in Ravensburg, Germany, that educates and entertains the whole family with its broad variety of puzzles, games, books, TV shows, and arts and crafts kits. The company is Europe's leading manufacturer of jigsaw puzzles, which are manufactured in Germany and the Czech Republic and marketed throughout the continent by the company's subsidiaries in major Western European countries. Ravensburger is also a leading manufacturer of brand name board games, and the Ravensburger brand is known by over 90 percent of German consumers. The company's game and toy manufacturing arm accounts for roughly 80 percent of total sales and about half of the company's revenues are generated around Christmas. Ravensburger's book publishing arm publishes educational and entertaining books for children, from toddlers to teenagers. The company's products are exported to more than 50 countries around the world. Other Ravensburger subsidiaries produce programming for German television stations, help brand name companies with event planning and promotion, and run the company's amusement park. Ravensburger is owned by fewer than a dozen members of the founding Maier family. As a publishing enterprise, Ravensburger evolved from the Dorn'sche Buchhandlung, a bookstore in the southern German town Ravensburg near the Bodensee lake. Since 1845, the bookstore had been partly owned and run by bookseller, journalist, and publisher Carl Maier. After his sudden death in 1867, his wife Julie inherited his share in the bookstore. In 1876, after completing apprenticeships with booksellers in Berlin, Graz, and Zurich, Carl Maier's oldest son Otto Robert--then 24 years old--became co-owner of the Dorn'sche Buchhandlung. Besides managing the bookstore in Ravensburg, he soon developed a special interest in the publishing activities the store ran as a side business. Accommodating the bookstore's customers, Dorn'sche Buchhandlung published maps and booklets focusing on the geography, biology, and history of the region, how-to literature for craftspeople, textbooks for schoolchildren, sheet music of church hymns, and a few board games. In 1883, Otto Robert Maier signed his first publishing contract with two architects to produce a collection of patterns for gravestones to be used by local stonemasons. One year later, Maier signed a local teacher and author to create eight Gesellschaftsspiele --games for adults--which were then released by Dorn'sche Buchhandlung. In 1884, Maier published his first commissioned board game for the whole family: Reise um die Erde ("A Trip Around The World"). The game was modeled after the popular novel by Jules Verne, Around the World in 80 Days, which had been published nine years earlier. By the time the game was published, there was already a thriving market for a broad variety of games for children, teenagers, and adults in Germany. Reise um die Erde, in which players could follow the adventurer Phineas Fogg on his trip around the world, became a bestseller and remained in Maier's catalogue for 30 years. Besides the use of a popular theme, the game's success was credited primarily to its lavish color and graphics, its detailed tin figurines, and the high-quality durable board. A handful of suppliers--specialty printers, book binders, figurine and dice makers--delivered the different