Gilberta Company

The Gilberta Company is a store dealing with clothing and beauty products.

The company was established by a seamstress named Gilberta.

Traditionally a man (usually the husband) is taking care of the selling and trading, while the woman is charge of the sewing of the clothes. The actual ownership of the company is also passed down to the female members of the family.

The company began to grow in renown and size under Benno's father and his wife began making clothes for nobles. However, the company experienced a decline when he was killed by bandits while traveling to another city. His wife died shortly after, leaving Benno to run the company and raise Corinna on his own until she reached adulthood.

Due to practically everyone assuming that Benno was much to young and inexperienced to successfully lead a company at such a young age, most of the company's employees canceled their contracts and moved on. Only Mark remained loyal and stayed by Benno's and Corinna's side.

Even when Mark's parents tried to use the Gilberta Company's weakened state to crush and absorb it, Mark stayed true to Benno and cut ties with them. In the following rivalry Mark peronally crushed his family's company, driving them to ruin and helped Benno lead the Gilberta Company back onto the road of success.

By the time Myne first met Benno, the company was going stronger than ever and had restored it's place among Ehrenfest's most profitable and influencial stores. Their influence is particularly strong within the seamstresses guild, leading Effa to fear to lose her job if her daughter Tuuli failed to show the proper respect to Corinna.

Benno first met the six year old Myne when Otto, who met her while working at the gate, introduces her and Lutz to tell the boy about travelling merchants. Realizing how foolish it would be to pursue this career, Lutz instead decides to become a city merchant's apprentice and together with Myne they negotiate with Benno to allow them to become his apprentices if they manage to make a prototype of their plant based paper before their baptism the following year.

As part of the negotiations, Myne gave over the production rights for Simple All-in-One Shampoo to Benno, who renamed it to the simpler and shorter name Rinsham. It soon becomes a hit and a mainstay in the company's catalogue among rich commoners, soon to be followed by lacework hairsticks and other products invented by Myne.

Initially this doesn't cause any problems, since shampoo and hair ornaments are well within the lineup of the Gilberta Company, but upon starting to sell paper and certain other inventions, Benno quickly starts to budd heads with vested interests. At Myne's insistence he negotiates a compromise with the parchament's guild to make parchament mandatory for official documents and only allow plant paper for other uses, to avoid the risk of the entire guild and all it's stores being driven out of business by the cheaper and easier to produce paper, calming some of the tensions down for a while.

After their baptism, Lutz is given a leherl contract, but Myne having to admit to herself that due to her poor health she would be unable to work as a merchant's apprentice instead accepts the position of forewoman of the Myne Workshop, a subsidiary of the Gilberta Company. Shortly after Myne ends up becoming an apprentice shrine maiden at the temple, but manages to successfully negotiate with the High Priest to be allowed to keep her position as forewoman.

She even manages to convince the authorities in the temple to allow her to open a branch of her workshop in the temple's orphanage to alleviate the horrible conditions there. With the income that the orphans generate from work in the workshop, they should even be able to sustain themselves, should Myne leave the temple in the future.

In part out of gratitude for the Gilberta Company's role in improving the conditions in the orphanage, the grey priests instruct some of the Gilberta Company's apprentices - Lutz among them - in the manners, language and behavior expected of those interacting with nobles.

When Benno decides to expand his business into the territory of eatieries, he also manages to get permission to have two of his employees - Hugo and Ella - trained in the Orphanage Director's chamber to make food worthy of nobility for his Italian Restaurant.

Benno's continued drive to expand and the massive profits they make from the new products leads to more and more problems with other stores who argue that the Gilberta Company, as a clothing store had no place in selling products so far outside their portfolio. It also caused the master of the Merchant's Guild Gustav to put up ever more vehement resistence against Benno, standing in his way at every opportunity. At one point he even risked the ire of the Archduke, when he delayed proceedings that could have led to people coming to harm due to violating a magic contract that had been approved by the Archuduce, signed and already taken effect, but not verified and thus not published by the Merchant's Guild in order to interfere with Benno.

To reduce the tensions and to share the burden of working so closely with nobles, Benno brings Gustav and his Othmar Company into the Italian Restaurant as partners, though it is mostly Gustav's granddaughter Freida and her cook Leise who involve themselves with it. Gustav and Benno also get swapped up in the rushed construction and outfitting of the Hasse Monastery by the Archduke personally.

Even with the Guildmaster now more or less on Benno's side, the other stores of the city continue to grow more and more dissatisfied, so Benno eventually decides to form a new company, leaving the production of clothes and beauty products to the Gilberta Company, while taking over all of the other products into the new store. His new patron and partner Lady Rozemyne was the one to provide the new store with it's name: Plantin Company.

Along with Benno himself, Mark and Lutz transfered over to the new store, leaving the Gilberta Company to Corinna and her husband Otto.

After Benno left the Gilberta Company, the story hired Tuuli. Thanks to her close connections with Rozemyne she is even able to become a leherl. This relation with Rozemyne also opens many doors among the nobility to the Gilberta Company, seeing their hairsticks and Rinsham spreading even among the highest levels of noble society and upon Rozemyne's entry into the Royal Academy even bringing them to the attention of nobles from other duchies.