Gilberta Company (Anime)

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 Lehange 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 church, but manages to successfully negotiate with the Head 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 cathedral'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.