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= Georg Schicht =

Georg Schicht Sr (15 March 1820 - 7 October 1887) was the founder of the Schicht Company. He took over his parents' profession (soap makers) and managed to create a succesful business in 1848.

Personal life
Georg married on 22nd October 1847 to Theresa Sanze, and together they had nine children – eight sons and one daughter. Georg had studied architecture before moving with his wife and daughter Anna to Reichenberg and starting their soap venture.

On 7th October 1887, Georg suffered a heart attack and passed away.

Career
Son of Anton, a soap and candle maker and merchant, Georg set out to continue in the trade and was responsible for the building of the family’s first soap factory after obtaining a permit from the authorities on 6th July 1848 to establish a factory at Ringelshain. Trade steadily increased, and by the middle 1870s the Schicht business had grown into more than a village affair. It supplied by pack-horse a market that included a wide area in Northern Bohemia. Raw materials were obtained from Leopold Bachmayer, a merchant in Vienna. In 1872, Georg sent his son Johann to serve out an apprenticeship with Backmayer, which gave him the opportunity to think on broad lines of the future of the family business.

While Johann gained more responsibility in the business, Georg still oversaw the main running and decisions of the business. In 1874, Johann wrote to his father with the proposals of opening another factory in Aussig, however, after seeing how much money had been invested in Ringelshain, Georg decided it was not worth the financial risk to open a new factory, and so set aside this son’s proposals in favour of letting the business grow further.

In 1878, Georg officially made his sons Johann and Josef partners the company. In 1882, it became clear there was a need for a bigger site, and so the earlier proposed factory at Aussig was finally built. In the mid 1880s Georg established a palm kernel crushing mill, the first in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The mill was completed in 1887 and was supplied with raw materials from a Liverpool firm of oil merchants. Within a few years Georg added a washing powder mill, a water glass factory, a fatty acid plant, a stearine plant, and a copra-crushing mill.