Not "gallant", not "garland." Galland.
There are a number of companies out there who do good business with supervillains on the side. There are a bunch of others owned outright by supervillains, because it's good to have a cover for your cunning schemes. Galland Corp is none of those. They're just crummy.
An Innocuous History
Originally, they were a shoe company. They had one of those sorts of patents that revolutionized the production of well-made shoes, and they used it to build a company that has since expanded to cover a bunch of very different products, from appliances to clothes to nanotech. Recently they expanded into organic stuff, working with medicines and some genetically modified food products.
This latter move has only come about since Emilia Galland took over her father's company. So it's not really reflective of their previous company focus.
In the beginning, Victor Galland had a really good idea for making shoes well, and his wife Lucia's charisma was enough to turn it into a business. They branched out because they loved their community and the people in it and responded to the things they asked for. So for them, and for their son, they had the reputation of being a homey little company that made good quality things, even as they grew well past "little" and reached "corporation" size.
I'm telling you this just so you can see how disappointing Emilia Galland is as the current iteration of CEO.
Time For Modern Changes
Emilia fell victim to the common practices of successful businesspeople everywhere. To an extent. CEOs can pick two of three things: good at making money, a good person, a good parent. He chose the first two. No one's perfect. And to be fair, Emilia's many, many failings, while coming from this tragic lack, cannot be solely blamed on her parents.
She's a person of contradictions, and not the fun contradictions that humanize someone, the kind that make someone a hypocrite. For example, she initially went to great effort to state publicly that she didn't want to inherit her father's company, that this was a massive burden and she would just have to do her best and no one should be surprised if she reshaped things. And yet a little digging reveals that she was meant to inherit the fortune and not the company and she in fact contested the will so she would gain control.
There's also the part where she publicly supports environmental causes, to the extent of spending "all of her free time" volunteering at various clean-up days (complete with media presence and spending most of her time talking to reporters instead of actually cleaning things). Privately, she deliberately chooses the worse options for her production lines so she can then market her decontaminants to the people in the area.
That sort of person. So it's gone from a family-based company with strong roots in the community and a reputation for quality, to a company with a consistent air of menace whose CEO might have offed her own siblings.
E/N: There's some speculation as to whether Gianna and Pascal Galland are actually dead. They've been seen in public, but their appearances are rare, and there are some inconsistencies that have led to conspiracy theories.
Comments