Adam Tanner, writing for Forbes:
Michael Otto joined the family’s catalog business in 1971 at age 28. Though the family had become successful, he remained a product of his hardscrabble roots. He paid for his own college education by starting a real estate business, which gave him street smarts to go with his eventual doctorate in economics. He’s still that way: He buys his suits off the rack, and while he has a direct line to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, helped Christo win permission to wrap the Reichstag in silver fabric and has a species of lemur named after him, he remains the prototypical northern German merchant, steeped in modesty and dignity. His favorite hobbies: gardening and traveling off the beaten path (he recently returned from a ten-day camping trip in Kazakhstan). “I have a good understanding how it is to be poor,” he says. “I sometimes cannot understand how people who became successful seem to be a different person.”
I had never heard of the Otto Group. But the Amazon connection seems tenuous to me. It’s unlikely that anyone will be able to compete with Amazon at general retail in the near future, but I also don’t expect all individual verticals to be owned by Amazon.