Tuesday, 18 May 2010 - agenda

Albert Sefranek, former managing director at MUSTANG, celebrates his birthday 90 years old…

Albert Sefranek, former managing director at MUSTANG, celebrates his birthday 90 years old… and still got it.

“If you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, you have to take it!” proclaims Albert Sefranek. And the jeans pioneer from Künzelsau, Germany, made sure he did just that. Levi Strauss invented jeans, but it was Albert Sefranek who brought them to Europe. By creating the MUSTANG brand he has ensured that his name will go down in fashion history. On May 18 he will celebrate his 90th birthday in Künzelsau.

When the 25-year-old Albert Sefranek returned home from the war in 1945, he had to say goodbye to his dream of studying to become an engineer. The Great Depression had forced Albert’s mother-in-law, Luise Hermann, to set up a sewing workshop where she made work clothes in her home in 1932. As her son-in-law – who originally hailed from Ammerndorf near Nuremberg – arrived in Künzelsau, Luise greeted him saying: “We don’t need a university graduate, we need someone who is going to work!” This is how Albert Sefranek came to work for the L. Hermann firm, managing the procurement of textiles, buttons and fasteners, and selling the work clothes.

A relative of Albert worked at the time in a shop that sold second-hand clothes from the American troops, as part of the post-war effort to overcome clothing shortages. He introduced Albert to a product that was not yet available in Europe – the GIs' blue trousers. He wanted to sell the much sought-after jeans in his shops, but the trousers were considered too tight and were frowned upon as “vulgar”. They were impossible to buy and Luise Hermann at first refused to agree to Albert’s suggestion that they begin manufacturing these trousers that, in her opinion, were “like something worn by fairground workers”.

This did not stop the young entrepreneur from making his way to Frankfurt with six bottles of “Hohenloher” schnapps, which he traded with an American GI for six pairs of jeans. The move paid off and after securing an order for 300 pairs, Albert managed to change his mother-in-law’s mind. In the family business the GI’s trousers were taken apart, modified here and there and used as the basic pattern for the first jeans to be made in Europe. To begin with they were made from durable German blue twill material, but from 1958 the design could finally be made from the real thing. Albert Sefranek bought 40,000 yards (36,000 meters) of denim costing more than 100,000 Deutschmarks – without his mother-in-law’s knowledge. “I ordered our first genuine US denim cloth bales in secret. My mother-in-law didn’t know anything about it,” confesses Albert. “My God, she would have had a heart attack if she had known how much I ordered and how much it cost – if selling these jeans hadn’t worked out, we would have been ruined.” Yet this investment was to secure the future of the small Künzelsau firm.

Jeans, the revolutionary trousers, had finally arrived in Europe. All that was left was to find the right name. Inspired by the American way of life he saw at the movies, Albert found the perfect name during a brainstorming session in Künzelau’s Café Frick in 1958 – MUSTANG. He felt the wild horse represented the perfect embodiment of freedom, adventure, and the worldview he wanted his jeans to represent.

Albert’s idea proved to be a big seller, and the demand for “the jeans with the horse” could not be quelled. The MUSTANG name was the basis of further successes, such as Germany’s first women’s jeans and Europe’s first corduroy jeans. As MUSTANG developed into an international denimwear and lifestyle brand, opening its own stores and establishing subsidiaries in Frankfurt, Moscow, and Hong Kong, for example, Albert watched with interest while taking it all in his stride.

Over the course of his professional life, this man of action has also been very active in an honorary capacity. In his own locality he has held honorary positions at the Ingelfinger tennis club, the health insurance firm AOK, the local chamber of commerce and industry, the Hohenlohe art society, the Hohenlohe cultural foundation, and has as a judge at the Heilbronn commercial court acted for many years. On a national level he has held the position of advisory board president for the Interjeans trade fair in Cologne, was an active member of the Deutsche Bank advisory board and committee member of the German Clothing Industry Association. The former premier of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Lothar Späth, awarded Albert the state’s medal of merit in 1986 for his outstanding work as an entrepreneur and a “pioneer in professional marketing in the jeans industry”.

In 1995 Albert Sefranek withdrew from the management of the firm, passing it on to his son Heiner who had been active in managing the company since 1974. Although he at first found it hard to leave the day-to-day business behind, he still celebrated his departure. An unhappy turn of events in his personal life also played a role in his decision, as his wife, Erika, was seriously ill. Albert cared for her until her death, three months before his 80th birthday.