Carl Franz Bally, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Carl Franz Bally

Swiss businessman (1821-1899)

Date of Birth: 24-Oct-1821

Place of Birth: Schönenwerd, Canton of Solothurn, Switzerland

Date of Death: 05-Aug-1899

Profession: politician, entrepreneur

Nationality: Switzerland

Zodiac Sign: Scorpio


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About Carl Franz Bally

  • Carl Franz Bally (October 24, 1821, Schönenwerd – August 5, 1899) was a Swiss businessman who founded the Bally Shoe company in 1851. Carl Franz Bally (Fig.
  • 1) was the 11th of 14 children of Peter Bally (1783–1849) and Anna Maria Herzog.
  • His grandfather, Franz Ulrich Bohli (1748–1810) immigrated as a young man from Vorarlberg in west part of Austria to Schönenwerd in the Canton of Solothurn in Switzerland, working as a mason for a manufacturer of silk ribbons.
  • Later, he established his own silk ribbon manufacture in that town, relying mostly on work outsourced to local weavers.
  • His sons Peter and Niklaus continued and enlarged the firm producing also suspenders and elastic fabrics and building an extensive second facility in Säckingen, (Germany).
  • Carl Franz, one of the ten sons of Peter, entered the business at age 17 concentrating on the newest products.
  • During a business trip to Paris he visited a shoe manufacturing plant and began to think about producing shoes, founding his own small facility in 1851.
  • After initial difficulties the business began to flourish and in the early 1870s he established sales organizations in Buenos Aires (Argentina), Montevideo, (Uruguay) and Paris, (France).
  • By 1880 Bally had transformed Schönenwerd from a sleepy farm village to an industrial center offering employment to hundreds of workers (Fig.
  • 2) from the town and surrounding towns in what developed into one of the world’s leading shoe manufacturing enterprises. Carl Franz was a progressive liberal, pushing forward many new ideas in the town, now taken for granted.
  • He and his wife opened a special education school for girls, a kindergarten, an old-age home and a public swimming facility at the bordering Aare river.
  • He built homes for workers and converted a flood region of the Aare in town into a luscious, publicly accessible park.
  • He fought battles to break the long established bond between school education and religion (Schönenwerd is the location of a small monastery originally built around 600 AD) and supported the establishment of improved schooling facilities for grade schools and a regional middle school.
  • To fill the need for workers he opened small manufacturing facilities in several towns in the surrounding region.
  • He also served as a lawmaker in various local and federal positions.
  • Carl Franz and his wife Cecile Rychner (1823–1893) had two sons, Eduard and Arthur, who continued their father’s business under the name C.
  • F.
  • Bally Söhne.
  • Around the turn of the century, the firm employed some 3200 workers and produced over two million pairs of shoes a year.
  • Carl Franz Bally died in Basel in 1899.

Read more at Wikipedia

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