Chronicle
The 1990s: the company's first high-street stores and Internet launch
In the 1990s, Weltbild pressed ahead with the expansion of its sales channels. In 1994, the publishing house, together with the bookseller Hugendubel, opened their first three high-street stores in Landsberg, Weilheim and Fürth.
Weltbild has been offering its range of products online at www.weltbild.de since 1997. Two years later, it launched its "Booxtra" Internet bookshop which nowadays is known as buecher.de. It expanded its catalogue business in 1999 by adding the "Jokers" catalogue for remainders and special editions.
Weltbild Verlag celebrated a major success in 1994 with its book entitled “Scientology – Ich klage an� (Pattloch). The book made it to third place in SPIEGEL’s list of bestsellers. One year later, Weltbild sold 30,000 exceptional bibles by the artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser in the space of only six months for a price of just under 1,000 DM per copy.
In November 1995, Weltbild dispatched one million parcels in a single month for the first time ever. From then on, its range of products included software and games as well as gift articles and hobby and leisure-related products. The Weltbild mail-order service was now available via telephone seven days a week around the clock.
To coincide with its 50th anniversary, the company moved into its new headquarters in the Lechhausen district of Augsburg in 1998.
In 1999, Weltbild merged seven of its own book publishing houses with five book publishing houses belonging to Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck to form Verlagsgruppe Droemer Knaur with headquarters in Munich. In the same year, Weltbild acquired the Nuremberg-based Sailer Verlag, a publisher of high-quality educational magazines for children and teenagers.
