Rollei name for MF no more ... it's back to Franke & Heidecke

<p>I just read that the pro end of Rollei has broken free. The medium format line is now

trading under it's historical name of Franke & Heidecke <a href="http://www.bjp-

online.com/public/showPage.html?page=311113">see this BJP article</a><p>

<p>

A cynical view of this move is that Samsung found no value in the MF line, only wanting to

keep the Rollei name, and was otherwise prepared to let the MF line die. </p>

Such is the power of brand names. In my opinion, brand law should not protect brands once they have been deprived of their content, i.e. the company and products the brand stood for when it was recognized and memorized be people. Because that is the value of a brand: That people remember (good) products, companies and services that they associate with the brand name. Once that is gone, the brand is only an empty hull and can be misused to designate mostly unrelated products like in this case.

 

In this case, the products we think of when we hear Rollei, are the cameras now produced by Franke & Heidecke, who seem to be deprived of their name.

 

Wonder what is going to happen to the Rolleiflex brand now. Can they not print Rolleiflex on their TLR cameras now? Maybe they can get a license....

When I look at their website, there appear to be nine product lines, only two of which are related to far-east style electronics, the other seven are traditional photo products and precison instruments.

Old news. Samsung already sold its stock in Rollei years ago. This newest split up is from

after that adventure and took place last year. Fact is that the factory is still located where it

has always been (Brunswick) and that a new company under the Rollei brand name is

founded in Berlin. It seems to be aiming at multi-media IT. Good thing the MF camera

department has nothing to do with that. There is an interesting press release from

September 2005 in the German section of the Rollei website:

http://www.rollei.de/index_d.html (I can't deep link).

 

I happen to know quite some people at the Brunswick factory and every time I meet them I

am pleasantly surprized by their love and dedication to MF. Unlike Hasselblad they have

obviously put the money where it should go: their production plant is more like a

laboratory, while their other buildings are most modest. No fancy interiors or anything.

Just plain boring German chairs and tables. Great people making great products there!

Michael,

 

Perhaps it helps to know that the Rolleiflex (a model name) has originally been a product

from Francke & Heidecke. When that factory went broke many years ago and a restart was

made it was called Rollei for legal reasons. So the brand name was a follow up of the name of

a product. The way it is now is historically more correct. There are even some of the heirs of

Francke & Heidecke in the board of directors. I think it only to be logical that the cameras will

still be called Rolleiflexes, because that's what they are.

Franke & Heidecke may need a license from the new owners to use the Rolleiflex name. I don't know the details of the deal.

The owner of Rollei Fototechnic GmbH was Danish investor group http://www.capitellum.dk/english/index.html (http://www.capitellum.dk/english/referencer.html). As i know this finance group is an owner of Rollei GmbH. As you know Franke & Heidecke GmbH is independent company. Franke & Heidecke will produce all products with historical names: Rolleiflex, Rolleivision. Be sure.

I agree with Michael that names shouldn't be used by people that had nothing to do with the original product to sell products unrelated to the, especially when there is no real continuity from original to current.

 

However, defining an acceptable lineage will not be an easy task. It isn't that hard to find examples where over time there has been a total mutation one step at a time, sometimes punctuated by bankruptcies, with little but some soon to be obsolete tooling or soon to retire employees to create the link from old to new.

 

The Zeiss Ikon conflict might be one such case. If I remember correctly, the original owners reorganized the company into a kind of foundation owned by the employees some time before the second world war. During the war, the management, engineers, and technicians were captured, then employed by the captors to manufacture optics for their war effort.

 

After the war, the original company and employees continued on in Jena I think in the original facility, while the upper level re-established a firm in West Germany and began producing products under the same label.

 

Litigation ensued in east and west to determine which group had the right to use the Zeiss Ikon name, with the supreme court of each ruling for the home team. That left the western group with the western market and the eastern group with the eastern market.

 

My again sometimes tricky memory is that the products sold as Zeiss Ikon in the east were marketed as Zeiss Jena here in the west, not because of lineage, legalities, or even a coin toss, but rather through politics.

 

I didn't try to verify my especially dim memory of the legal squables, which must have occurred somewhere around the 60s, but here is a link to the non-legal history and how things have played out since then: http://www.zeisshistorica.org/companies.html

 

You can see there that the pathway back to the original Zeiss name is if anything a more tortuous a trail than the Rollei route.

David, you are right. What you offer to do if at this moment the owner of name "Rollei", "Rolleiflex" and etc is Rollei GmbH (producer of digital cameras and mp3, mp4)? The division of companies was at end of last September but this was a result of annual activity. The actions started at April, 2004. The owners of Franke & Heidecke are two grandsons of the former company founders and other four persons which work in company many years.

It need to have a time to change situation.

Most of you probably know that the Leica name is now owned by the medical optimetric machinery unit, and that the camera group leases the name back to apply it to the cameras.

 

This came about several years ago at the hands of one of the revolving-door CEOs who decided to sell rights to the name to medical equipment unit.

 

There is some irony in that Leica is a contraction of Leitz Camera, and I believe there are still Leitz family members on the camera unit board.

 

I may not have all this exactly, but you get the picture. It's German corporate brand management to the highest bidder.

 

Cheers,

Ray Hull

As far as I'm concerned Rollieflex has been dead a long time. In the future, film camera purist will have to do what Ferrari devotees do, that is, ask what serial number the item in question is. This will help place it in its proper context.

 

Take the M3 or the M6 for example. The trade name tells me little. But the serial number tells me if its double stroke, SS and the various iterations.

Sorta reminds me of the fact you can buy 35mm film (made by Fugi i think) which says Polaroid on it and you can buy the cooresponding point-and-shoot "Polaroid" 35mm camera. The cameras instructions tell you to make sure you buy "Polaroid" 35mm film to use in it! What a normal el-cheapo 35mm point-and-shoot and normal 35mm film have anything to do at all with the Polaroid name or Edwin Lands experiements doesnt mean anything except that its a brand that people recognize. We live in a society where people will pay extra money to have eye-glasses which say Armani or Versace despite the fact that they look silly and that Armani and Versace know absoultely nothing about vision optics! If people who know what they are looking for want a Rollei, they wont be buying an el-cheapo point-and-shoot digital camera in the mall... And people who dont know anything about it probably wont know who the heck Rollei is anyway.

All in all, this is better news than we had any right to expect. I've always loved and used

Rolleiflex cameras and I hope I always will.

Has anyone heard which part came away from the split up with the pension debt load or whether that was split up as well?