Nostalgia - Drumbo

Some years ago when I still did the "Finds of the week" posts, I had some called "I'm a collector" in which I shared vintage items. Over time my collections have mostly stopped growing due to different reasons, but they are still there and still loved. I also have vintage items, some inherited, some gifts, some from fleamarkets, some more interesting than others. So I thought it could be fun to share some of them every, now and then and tell their story.

Although my family wasn't a customer of the Dresdner Bank (which has a rather infamous history, but that's not the topic of this post), we knew Drumbo of course. I didn't know his name was Drumbo, but I knew the little elephant that had been introduced as a money box in 1972 for the World Savings Day. My friend had one and I thought it was so cute!
Rumor had and still has it that the famous designer Luigi Colani is responsible for the minimalistic design, but according to the Commerzbank blog (the Commerzbank swallowed the bigger Dresdner Bank in 2009) that is not true, it was the designer Bernd Diefenbach who worked for a Munich design studio. I didn't know that myself before today.
Drumbo - the name was chosen from the 1.659 employees' suggestions and is a mix of the words "Dresdner Bank", "Dumbo", and "Jumbo" - came in green first (the bank's color was green), but later different sizes and colors were available. There were even porcelain version, plush animals, paperweights, and more.
You can still get Drumbo today, but only in yellow now because that is the Commerzbank's color.

My elephants that we got at a fleamarket years ago out of nostalgic feelings are orange and yellow as I don't like the particular green of the original one.
They are 6 cm and while I can't tell what year they are from exactly, I know they are not new as it says Dresdner Bank at the bottom.

As you can see there's no lock. If you wanted to empty your elephant, you had to use the knife in the slit method which required some patience, but also was kind of fun, but you better didn't wait until it was full because then the only way to get your money out again was to break it!
The new versions and bigger sizes, though, do have locks.
So my Drumbos are not being used (as if I had money to save when there are beads, ha), but guard the category "Nature" in my bookcase instead.