Mail-order company goes bust

       The venerable German mail-order company Quelle is shutting down more than 80 years after revolutionising the country's retail landscape, having missed customers' move to online shopping.
       The unit of insolvent German retailer Arcandor failed to find new investors and would be closed down, Arcandor's insolvency administrator Klaus Hubert Goerg said on Tuesday.
       A Quelle employee who took part in a staff meeting at the company's headquarters in Nuremberg said October's salaries would still be paid but beyond that nothing was certain.
       "It's over, crying doesn't help," Quelle employee Marianne Thieg told Reuters.A colleague added:"Quelle is dead."
       At least half of the 10,500 employees of Arcandor's Primondo unit, which Quelle is part of, could lose their jobs,but no official figures have yet been given.
       Marco Atzberger, retail expert at EHI retail institute, said Quelle's downfall was a result of the company's own problems rather than an industry-wide malfunction."Quelle is a tragic story,because the mail order business in general works quite well. They failed to integrate the online business properly and relied too strongly on the catalogue business," he said.
       The Quelle catalogue used to be a common feature in Germany's letter boxes and fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld even offered his collection "KL by Karl Lagerfeld" in the autumn/winter 1996-97 catalogue.
       Quelle was founded by Gustav Schickedanz in 1927, naming it after his business idea to sell products directly to the customers right from the source, or "Quelle," in German.
       But the emergence of the Internet took shoppers online, rapidly boosting sales of online retailers like Amazon.com Inc and eBay Inc.
       "While the catalogue is not obsolete,it is not the main sales driver either, any more," EHI's Atzberger said.
       The German E-Commerce and Distance Selling Trade Association (bvh)expects online shopping will for the first time this year make up more than half of the overall sales in the mail-order industry, which it estimates at 29.1 billion ($43.6 billion) for 2009.