How it all started at GBK: That's how our growshop was born!
Who founded it?
Jöran Kortmann is the founder and majority shareholder at Gärtnereibedarf Kortmann GmbH in Lüdinghausen, officially. In fact, he is the masterbrain at GBK and Greenception.
How did this happen?
In the 1990s, Jöran's uncle, the master gardener Reiner Kortmann, received a large quantity of 400W sodium vapour lamps as compensation for an unpaid invoice. After Jöran's own business was equipped, there was still a considerable amount of leftover stock, which could be used for a long time.
One day Reiner approached Jöran with the following question: "You know about the internet, don't you? There's Ebay. Can't you sell my lamps there?" Jöran could - and that was the nucleus of the GBK shop. At first, Jöran sold plant lamps alongside his studies, using the company structure of his father, Willi Kortmann, who, as a qualified horticultural engineer, ran a flower wholesale business.
The second fateful step was an advertisement in the horticultural trade press in which a Dutch company for horticultural equipment was looking for customers for used sodium vapour lamps. It turned out that the father of the company owner and Jöran's grandfather, master gardener Franz Kortmann, were already business partners. When families do business with each other over three generations, contracts are also possible with a handshake.
>GBK began to grow. In 2003, the company became too big for sideline management, the Gärtnereibedarf Kortmann GmbH was founded by Jöran and Willi Kortmann with Jöran as the sole managing director.
