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A long-established company makes history.
In 1883, the brothers Carl and Adolf Vorwerk founded the textile company Barmer Teppichfabrik Vorwerk & Co., with the aim of producing high-quality English-style carpets. In the beginning the company used English looms, as well as weavers and craftsmen from the British Isles. In 1898 the company set up an engineering work-shop to produce its own looms, which developed into a fully-fledged engineering works by 1908. This was where the principle of the interwoven carpet was discovered by accident, resulting from a mistake in adapting the machines.
This mistake was the foundation of the company´s success until the world economic crisis loomed. The carpets made by Vorwerk were highly rated and popular in Germany and the neighbouring countries - technology aside, their tasteful designs were the main reason. In the 1920s Vorwerk, as well as manufacturing carpets, made a name for itself as a manufacturer of car axles, gearboxes and gramophone motors. This part of the business declined rapidly with the coming of radio in 1926, but it gave Vorwerk its first experience of electrically driven products.The onset of the world economic crisis in 1929 brought the gramophone industry to a complete standstill.
A virtue was made out of necessity, however - the engineer Engelbert Gorissen used the original gramophone motor to construct the heart of a completely new vacuum cleaner, the Kobold, an innovation which retains a cult status to this day. In spite of this, the company´s textile department - owing to state intervention in the supply of raw materials in the years from 1933 to 1939 - was unable to achieve consistent growth. From 1945 the company expanded its range of electrical products, and was at last able to make progress with its carpet production. Already with a long tradition of carpet-making behind it, Vorwerk now manufactured carpeting for both private and commercial uses - notable for its consistently high standards of design. Efforts were made to liberate carpeting from its thankless role as a purely practical object, which bore fruit in the form of many high-quality creations.
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