Cerrek & Keresington's

**Cerrek & Keresington Textiles Incorporated** (commonly abbreviated to **C&K** and colloquially known as **Cerrek’s**) is a major textile retailer with headquarters in Cliffside, that specializes in manufacturing, distributing, and selling clothing and other textile products. Their sister company, Cerrek & Keresington Horticultural & Agricultural Sciences Limited, focuses primarily on Blue Death Flower research and development, with minor contributions to synthetic fabrics and agricultural technology.

C&K was founded in 94BV by Chester Keresington and Ronin Cerrek in Cliffside. Since its inception, C&K has expanded to 8 factories and 134 stores across Esterra, including 23 stores that sell only Cliffwall Cashmere sweaters.

## History

Although Keresington and Cerrek were initially bitter rivals competing for a monopoly on the Blue Death flowers, they eventually settled on an impersonal business partnership after their destructive quarreling provoked the wrath of the the Lesser God of the Mountains, Gretchen Skyshaker.

Keresington, a graduate of the University of Arcane Engineering, was interested in studying the Blue Death flowers in hopes of creating a Blue Death flower nursery as a constant source of pigment processing. He had already invented a plant extraction device that would prevent the flower from being damaged during harvest, but needed money to hire the manpower to actually climb the cliff walls and find the flowers.

Cerrek, a former cigar store owner from Anaghoro, knew a variety of wealthy people who were willing to finance his and Keresington’s business, provided they have a proof of concept first. Using some of his personal money, Cerrek hired ten willing mountaineers and explorers to pick a batch of the Blue Death flowers for Keresington to experiment with. Through the flowers that the employees brought to him, Keresington was able to develop a secret method for raising Blue Death flowers on regular altitude and soil. Impressed with the amount of Cliffwall Blue pigments Keresington was able to produce through his personal Blue Death flower farm, Cerrek’s cigar patrons provided the duo with enough money to develop a pigment processing plant on Cliffside.

C&K quickly entered into various business agreements with various textile companies around Esterra, and created their own textile processing plant next to the pigment plant two years after their launch. In 93AE, C&K launched their own factory-made cashmere sweater dyed in Cliffwall Blue, heavily marketed to the upper-class as the “epitome of fashion”. These sweaters, named the Cliffwall Cashmeres, proved to be a runaway hit, with even people in lower classes taking out huge loans to buy the C&K sweater.

## Expansion

With the popularity of the Cliffwall Cashmeres and Cliffwall Blue pigments, C&K quickly expanded from their main headquarters in Cliffside and developed satellite factories and storefronts in New Cresdale, Jonurian Point, Ragehammer, Urayah, and Bullion City. In 89BV, the sister company Cerrek & Keresington Horticultural & Agricultural Sciences Limited was founded in Cliffside, primarily spearheaded by Keresington as his solo project. Many of the horticulturalists and botanists employed under Keresington made advances in other pigments made of flowers, namely the Keresington Pink and the Ocean Violet. However, Blue Death flowers were to be handled solely by Keresington himself, and he shared the secret to Blue Death flower production to no one.

## Decline

C&K faced its first economic crisis when a mysterious factory fire in 88BV killed Keresington and destroyed all his research and Blue Death flower supply. Unable to produce the Cliffwall Blue pigments on their own anymore, C&K hastily employed a great number of people, ranging from actual mountaineers to small inexperienced children to harvest the Blue Death flowers from the cliffs. Thanks to the steady stream of people sent to harvest the flowers, the C&K pigment processing plants were able to resume limited production in 87BV. However, a great number of the people employed by C&K fell to their deaths while harvesting the flowers, and the surviving family were provided no compensation for their deaths. This sharply lowered the public image of the company for lower-middle class residents of Central Esterra, but as their main customers were always the upper class who didn’t care about the loss of lives, C&K were able to weather through the decline in popularity.