GEIB CASE REVIEW
In the Beginning
The Geib & Schaefer Company was established in 1899 in Chicago by two men with almost nothing to start on and a great deal of determination to make up for it. Charles A. Geib had left the family farm in rural Wisconsin at twenty, moved to Chicago, and gone to work at the Martin Weick Manufacturing Company where he spent four years learning the trade from the ground up. He had exactly three years of formal schooling. Jacob U. Schaefer had come from Germany in 1880 and spent twenty years at the Pullman Company before joining Weick, where he put in one more year before the two men decided to go into business together. Their first shop at 1739 Hancock Avenue had 800 square feet and six employees. In their first year they did about $ 13,000 in business, selling primarily to Chicago jobbers and dealers.
The founding had a matrimonial dimension as well. In May of 1900, Charles Geib married Elizabeth Schaefer, the daughter of his business partner. Six years later, Charles’ s brother Nicholas Victor Geib joined the firm as a partner, and proceeded to marry Jacob’ s other daughter, Mary. The Geib and Schaefer families were becoming, quite literally, the same family. By the time Jacob Schaefer died in 1916, the company had grown to 100 employees and 27,000 square feet of factory space at 1757 North Central Park Avenue, and it was being described in the trade press as the largest case manufacturer in the United States, and probably the world.
They were not simply building guitar cases. The product line by the late 1920s included
KantKrack composite shell cases, an early form of molded construction, the high-tech“ carbon fiber” of their day, baked in two-part metal molds over a gas flame in a room described by employees as something like a sauna. This was in addition to canvas cases, leather cases, megaphones, sample cases, thermos bottle cases, and eventually portable phonographs. Geib phonographs were still being advertised into the late 1940s. By 1928 the company was billing itself as the“ World’ s Largest Manufacturers of Musical Instrument Cases.” A 1923 factory expansion added a second major facility; by 1924 the two locations together comprised 50,000 square feet.
Charles Geib, the driving force of the early years, died in December 1921 at forty-five, of diphtheria. His estate went into trust, and his brother Nicholas assumed management of the business. A few years later, Charles’ s son Ambrose bought two-thirds of the estate’ s stock on an installment arrangement, with Nicholas co-signing the note. Nicholas owned two-thirds of the company; Ambrose owned one-third. At some point Ambrose expressed a wish to buy out the majority. Nicholas agreed in principle. They shook hands on it. Then the company started doing extremely well, probably after the Depression lifted, and when the time came to complete the deal, Nicholas reconsidered.“ He realized,‘ I’ ve got a gold mine here; I’ m not going to give it up,’” recalled John Geib, grandson of the founder.
Nicholas, who had founded the woodworking department, spent his days in the mill room talking to workmen and foremen, watching
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