Role model America

The idea of using sales vans originally came from the USA. When Gottlieb Duttweiler launched it in Switzerland, he showed photos of sales vans used by other companies around Europe.

In a lecture in 1926, Gottlieb Duttweiler confesses: “I do not claim to have invented anything, I have only put together ideas and methods in a practical way.” He alludes here to the sales vans that he had introduced to Switzerland the previous year, the idea for which originated from the US. The Mototeria Company, for example, had started operating travelling sales outlets in the US 25 years earlier. It is certainly no coincidence that the man who invented this idea, L. B. Watson, came from Henry Ford’s hometown of Detroit, as Ford pioneered cost reduction through rationalised assembly line production. As Watson explains in the New York Times: “The maintenance costs of shops and their sales assistants, the rents and the interest make the fixed costs huge for every shop owner.” Thanks to Mototeria, this changed as the company did not have to pay for unnecessary infrastructure: “The housewife can do her shopping in front of her own door and avoid having to pay for an expensive organisation.” The system of sales vans quickly gains a foothold in Europe. In Germany, for example, the heirs of Carl Fröhling, a haberdashery trader who opened a shop for “haberdashery and silk goods, sewing and trimming articles” in Gladbach in 1892, operate a whole fleet of sales vans. Gottlieb Duttweiler keeps up to date about this company and also gains information from photographs. This is why photos of foreign sales vans can still be found in the Migros archives today.