Werner Otto (entrepreneur)

Werner Otto was a German entrepreneur, born in 1909 and died in 2011 at the age of 102. After starting as a retail merchant in Szczecin and fleeing to Hamburg after the Second World War, he founded a shoe factory in 1948 that failed within a year. On 17 August 1949 he founded the mail order company Otto Versand in Hamburg, whose first catalog had fourteen pages and offered only shoes. The business grew into the Otto Group, which became the largest mail order group in the world, and he handed its management to his eldest son Michael in 1981. He also founded the shopping mall developer ECE in 1969, started the Sagitta Group in Canada, and developed the Paramount Group in New York to invest in United States real estate. He founded the Werner Otto Foundation for medical research.