My name is Hong Long Wendt. As managing director of CINNEA GmbH, I would like to briefly tell you the history of my company:
Asian lifestyles are very closely linked to nature. In addition, great importance is placed on purity. Unpleasant body odors are therefore an absolute taboo topic in Asia. Because guests take off their shoes out of respect for the host and sit directly on the floor for a tea ceremony, foot odor in particular can lead to unpleasant moments.
The tradition of cinnamon insoles arose from this custom. I became intensively involved with these fragrant shoe insoles very early on, because my family has been trading in cinnamon insoles since 1995 and exports them to well-known supermarket chains in Eastern Europe.
I came to Germany from Vietnam in 2000 because of my German studies. After about 2 years, the idea arose to tackle the problem of foot odor in Germany and to immediately find the appropriate solution. Luckily, I had already gained some initial knowledge of importing and exporting through working in my family's business and I was very proud of my new business idea. However, my entire environment in Germany was not very optimistic at the time - "The Germans and cinnamon insoles, that can't work!" True to the motto: "What the farmer doesn't know - he doesn't eat!"
Despite all the skepticism, I had my family send me around 200 pairs of cinnamon insoles in 2002 and started selling them in Germany as a small business. After just a few months I could already see the positive response and demand is constantly increasing to this day. So after just a few years I was able to increase the import of cinnamon insoles from Vietnam from a thousand to tens of thousands of pairs. Back in 1995, a small factory with around 12 seamstresses was needed to produce the cinnamon insoles. There are now over 100 employees.
