Braun Design in Asia

The founder, Max Braun, a successful technician at AEG in Berlin who moved to the Rhine-Main region for the sake of love, sets up his own business in Frankfurt a.M. in 1921 with just one product and a handful of employees. His new type of quick connector for broken transmission belts quickly became a bestseller and already in that same year at the Frankfurt Autumn Fair he found an English trading partner in Camp & Watson, who paid in British pounds and so rescued him from the German hyperinflation of 1923. Within just a few years, branches opened in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Tunisia and Morocco. A factory of his own was built in England with the first phonographs, while France became the most important export country for Max Braun’s record player arms.

In 1937, Braun formed part of the German contribution to the world’s fair in Paris. The company presented its own stand at the International Exhibition in Thessaloniki two years before and is promptly awarded a Grand Prix for the battery powered Koffersuper BSK 36.

Erwin and Artur Braun, the company’s next generation, continued to take an international approach after the Second World War. The USA became the most attractive market. In 1954, the company successfully signed a licensing agreement for razors with the US manufacturer Ronson for a phenomenal sum of 10 million dollars. This was the largest German foreign business agreement of the post-war period. Erwin Braun later described it as his greatest youthful sin, since Braun was not allowed to sell under its own brand name on the American market until 1975. They could also not really do much business there with household appliances and hi-fi systems. The competition was fierce, technically at least equal, and usually cheaper. Exports are primarily to Northern, Western and Southern Europe, but also to Poland and Yugoslavia. In the 1967/68 business year, foreign sales accounted for fifty-five percent of the total sales.

Japan

In 1959, Braun was represented for the first time at a German travelling exhibition at the Japanese Council of Industrial Design in Japan and again there in 1965 with the entire programme. In 1973, Braun was invited to present itself extensively at the ICSID Congress in Kyoto. Fritz Eichler, Dieter Rams and Wolfgang Schmittel attended.

Since the sixtant, shavers have been the financial backbone of the company and Japan quickly becomes the largest overseas market. From as early as the 1964/65 business year, Braun has had a market share of twenty percent there. At times it even is the market leader. With its first sixtant of 1962, as well as its successor models, Braun has produced appliances that are as elegant as they are reduced in form and therefore perfectly compatible with traditional Japanese aesthetics. South Korea and China did not play a role at that time, but this was to change significantly in the 1990s. Since 2020, the new shaver known as pocket, designed in Kronberg, has been manufactured solely by Xiaomi Mijia in China and distributed there and from there.

In another area, however, Japan contributed to the elimination of the audio sector, which was so important for Braun’s identity. The Braun atelier hi-fi systems, despite being produced in Japan and Taiwan for financial reasons, were no longer able to compete with Sony, Panasonic, Sharp or Onkyo in terms of price and technology. In 1991, Braun’s American management took the decision to close down the loss-making product line. Today, only 30 years later, a new attempt is being made at an audio product line at Braun in the form of three smart loudspeakers.

Two Braun designers were, or are, particularly influenced by traditional Japanese aesthetics. In the first instance, there was Gerd A. Müller, who had already familiarised himself with the country through books, as an enthusiastic cook through Japanese cuisine and then also by way of trips to Japan. And then came Dieter Rams. At the ICSID Congress in Kyoto in 1973, he had the opportunity of providing an extensive presentation of Braun design together with Wolfgang Schmittel and Fritz Eichler. The itinerary for this event gave him with an invaluable insight into traditional Japanese architecture and aesthetics. Like many other German representatives of modernist design, such as Hermann Muthesius, Bruno Taut or Walter Gropius, he regarded it and European modernism as kindred spirits. This enthusiasm can still be seen today in the garden of the Rams’ home in Kronberg, which was created in 1970.

Three decades later, in 2005, Dieter Rams exhibited his work in the Kennin Temple in Kyoto, which was organised by Miki Shimokawa. For Rams it remains his most memorable exhibition in Asia on account of the historic architecture.