Olymp entrepreneur Eberhard Bezner dies at the age of 90

“We wanted to move forward,” shirt manufacturer Eberhard Bezner once said about the beginnings of the Olymp company after the Second World War. His father Eugen is said to have produced the first shirts in the laundry room. Under the leadership of his son Eberhard, the company from Bietigheim-Bissingen was soon selling shirts all over the world. Eberhard Bezner has now died at the age of 90. He died on Tuesday at home surrounded by his family, the Baden-Württemberg company announced.

Bezner was born in Stuttgart in 1935. In 1953, after completing an apprenticeship as a textile and retail clerk, he joined his father's company. Just a few years later, at the age of 24, he moved to the top of the company after his father died unexpectedly.

He ran the family business for several decades and turned it into an increasingly global clothing manufacturer. In the 1960s, the “shirt pope,” as some people called him according to the FAZ, relocated part of production abroad. He countered criticism with the sentence: "If I hadn't gone abroad back then, the Olymp company would no longer exist."