The title of the article is "Black Forest Cuckoo Clocks", and I thought
it would be all too familiar information.  I was mistaken; here are a
few excerpts which describe the entrepreneur's business methods:

   "The farmers of the Black Forest could barely make a living farming
and lumbering, but they had a lot of wood and a lot of free time in the
winter.  By the end of the 1500s inexpensive wooden clocks were being
made in the Black Forest and sold outside the region."

   "It was not long before some sharp-minded businessman hit upon the
idea of hiring farmers to mass-produce wooden parts during the winter
months for meager wages.  The businessman could assemble them in a
central workshop and make a handsome profit.  Thus the Black Forest
clock industry was born."

   "By the late 1700s the Black Forest was providing all of Europe
with cheap clocks of all types. ... By the early 1900s over 50 percent
of the world's clocks were coming from the Black Forest."

   "Entrepreneurs were careful to have families produce only certain
parts so that each family became very skilled at making its part but
not capable of producing a whole clock and becoming a competitor."

I've read that the Waldkirch organ firms normally bought pipes from
another town, and wood carvings from perhaps yet another nearby
village; the practice seems to be a carryover from the clock-making.

See the whole article by Peter Henault in German Life magazine,
August/September 2001; the web site is http://www.germanlife.com/

Robbie Rhodes