The b+d ORIGINAL referee set

History and how it all began

History and background:
It all started with a cup match in the Rhineland in the early 70s between Andernach and Neuwied. Our founder Winfried Baaser had forgotten to pack all his whistling utensils and had to get everything together on the spot. "I took these pre-match problems into the game at the time and my performance was correspondingly poor", so Winfried Baaser recounts.

And yet it was a good day - in retrospect. Because it completely changed the professional life of him as a referee. Once at home he developed the idea for this referee set.

It had to be a folder containing everything a referee needs to officiate a game. At the time, Baaser was the managing director of a plumbing wholesaler, but he had always wanted to start his own business. And the referee set was the right idea!

The businessman experienced right from the start that having his own company can lead to many a sleepless night: "In order to make production worthwhile we had to have a correspondingly large number of units produced. That did cost several hundred thousand of marks and was a big risk - we didn't know whether anyone would buy the thing.

Baaser had the flat black cases sewn in the town of Kirn, where the relevant industry was virtually on the doorstep. And to make his new product known to potential customers, Baaser used a special medium 38 years ago: he enclosed an advertising leaflet from the DFB referee newspaper. It was a direct hit, because the readers were all potential customers and seemed to have been waiting for this offer. He sold 30,000 copies of the referee set in the very first year.

Soon after we also offered single  yellow and red cards and quickly we had a huge sale of match record cards and whistles, even ballpoint pens.

(Excerpt from DFB Schiedsrichterzeitung 06/2011, David Bittner)

Here you can order the b+d original referee set directly