The history behind BIBUS SINDBY (formily known as A/S H. Sindby & Co.)
BIBUS SINDBY A/S (formerly known as A/S H. Sindby & Co.) is a sound and well-established import business and wholesaler, with 100 years of expertise and knowledge built up around purchase and development of quality products, whose customer base can be found mainly within industry and the automotive industry.
Common sense and quality are the keywords in every aspect of running our business.
From the outset we have continuously been developing and changing into a company that is ready to cope with new challenges and take on new opportunities presented by countless niches within industry.
Managing Director Keld Hansen is the man behind BIBUS SINDBY today. In 2007 BIBUS AG took over the business from the previous owner and the Sindby family, who had been running the business since 1918 for more than three generations. The business has continuously developed alongside its customer base.
The aim has always been to spot new products, which could be added to the range of goods on offer – for the benefit of customers and then to our business. This aim is still at the heart of everything we do at BIBUS SINDBY as well as BIBUS.
The founder of the company Hans Sindby, born Sivertsen in Ribe 1876, founded after his apprenticeship an independent construction company with its own sawmill. Hans Sindby had a big preference for everything new, and in 1908 he was the first in the area around Ribe that had a Nimbus motorbike. The motorbike was used diligent to his many errands in the neighbourhood and after a while most people got used to the stove machine. Even the livestock at the farms failed to stampede, which made it much easier for Hans Sindby to sell a new barn to the farmer without the necessity of catching cattle before and after the meeting.
Until the First World War there were several public buildings in Southern Jutland where you could see a sign with the name H. Sivertsen. But when the war broke out Sivertsen became very active on the Danish-minded side and helped several prisoners of war to escape from the camps in the border area and he found some places where they could stay on farms in Southern Jutland. This went very well until the year 1916, where Hans Sindby and his wife had to leave Southern Jutland and move to Horsens for a shorter period of time and then (1918) on to Copenhagen, where he established A/S H. Sindby & Co. the 17th of November 1918, specializing in furniture fittings and accessories.
The company grew rapidly until and a little into 1920, but when Norway stopped import of furniture, the business was seriously threatened, and they turned towards the motor industry, since the company had a lot of agencies with many product lines within this area. Hans Sindby travelled on his own around in the country with his product program, and the success was so great that in 1926 it was necessary to hire two representatives one of which was Hans Nygård, who then was the face of the company in Jutland through 36 years. Long-term employment is not unusual, but more about that later in the story.
At the same time as we expanded our staff, we also had to add a few new products. The first shot was bus-windows from the British supplier Becklawatt, again selected based on the motto of always having what the market wanted and being ahead of the game on the product side.
Naturally, there were a number of spare parts to complement the windows, which meant that Sindby again had to look for new and larger storage facilities to ensure delivery. We then invested in the warehouse on Vesterfælledvej, and with extra square meters, there was room for two more product lines.
First, aluminum profiles were added to the range again, based on the buses of the time. Hans Sindby was right, as the same profiles could be seen in the catalog right up to the year 2000, and here in 2014 there are still a few left in the Hardware catalog.
But the biggest news was rubber profiles, which in the late twenties were marketed for bodywork and industry. No one can doubt that this was a milestone in the company's history. Today, more than 2000 different profiles are stocked and Sindby is rightly called the largest supplier of rubber in the Scandinavian market, several have larger volumes but none with a similar program. And we are still expanding.
In a more peculiar corner, the company was hit by the first fraud in the spring of 1929, when two anglers watched in amazement as a man dumped some large packages in the lake close to the headquarters. The fishermen decided to contact the police, who brought the packages to the surface and found that they came from us. The police then went to the company where the burglary had taken place. Shortly into the investigation, it became clear that the criminal was to be found in the accounts department. But even this could not stop Sindby, who again had to look for new and larger premises, this time in Reventlowsgade 12, where they took over the building from Gyldendal. Development continued unabated until the 1940s, and the next big bump in the road was a journeyman painter in Germany who managed to stop the development of Sindby during the Second World War, when all imports came to a halt with the outbreak of war. Hans Sindby restructured the company to sell Danish products such as hardware and bicycles instead, and this was maintained until the end of the war.
1944 was a landmark year for Sindby when the next generation joined the company's management with the appointment of Erik Sindby.