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125 years of Vorwerk Teppichwerke
Carl Vorwerk began the industrial manufacturing of carpets in Germany in 1883
Hamlin, june 2008 – As a member company of the international Vorwerk Group with its business divisions Direct Sales, Textiles and Services, today Vorwerk Teppichwerke is one of the leading providers of high-quality and design-oriented carpets. Around 5 million square metres of carpet are produced each year at the one and only production venue in Hamlin (Germany). The brand stands for high quality, a distinctive competence in design and furnishing, and for products which are health-oriented and display a sense of ecological responsibility. New for the brand is that it now stands for exclusive textile offers in the luxury segment, too.
Vorwerk carpets have been in existence for 125 years. From the very beginning, Vorwerk has placed a special emphasis on superior quality. At the same time, investments have been made continuously in innovative technology while the company made a name for itself beyond the borders of Germany through exclusive design.
HISTORY
It all started with the carpet
Vorwerk & Co., a carpet factory in what was then Barmen, Germany, was founded by Carl (1847–1907) and Adolf Vorwerk (1853–1925) on the 21st of April, 1883. Carl and Adolf had joined the parental company Vorwerk & Sohn in the 1870s. That time was preceded by a longer period abroad in which the two of them prepared themselves for their tasks to come: Carl in England, Adolf in Antwerp. A company publication from 1927 states that they “eagerly competed in developing and enlarging the paternal business.”
Making new ideas a reality and opening up new markets was a challenging prospect for them. The way to get hold of international markets for sales and production technologies was to acquire specialised companies. At the time, England was the only place where high-quality carpets were being manufactured. Carl Vorwerk was fascinated by the way carpets could be manufactured, but he was equally determined to put forward a quality ‘homespun’ product to counter imported merchandise from England. He exhibited entrepreneurial boldness and bought English carpet looms, hired on English weavers and masters, and had his own weavers trained in England. This posed the birth of carpet manufacturing in Germany on an industrial scale.
Carl Vorwerk transformed his patrician house shingled with native slate from the Bergisch Land region east of Cologne into the administration building for the rapidly growing company. He acquired the licence to construct looms and develop them further. And he systematically improved them, especially their control via perforated Jacquard cards, a predecessor of the computer punch card, as well as the widths of the carpets woven on them. Besides carpets, the weaving mill also produced fabrics for furniture back then.
A decisive change in executive management occurred in 1904. Carl Vorwerk had taken ill and placed the responsibility for the company in the hands of his son-in-law, August Mittelsten Scheid (1871-1955), who proceeded to have “Vorwerk” registered as a trademark for carpets 5 years later. He was succeeded by his sons Werner (1904-1953) and Erich Mittelsten Scheid (1907-1993), as well as by Werner’s son, Jörg Mittelsten Scheid (born in 1936), who ran Vorwerk & Co. from 1969 to 2005, and is currently a member of the Advisory Board.
The carpetworks in Barmen grew at a furious pace during the Mittelsten Scheid era. The renown of the Vorwerk brand rapidly extended beyond the local region. The production figures rose. New buildings were erected. An own machine-building plant enlarged the company’s facilities. These were soon joined by additional production areas that mark Vorwerk diversification to this day - meanwhile as a company operating worldwide.
Parallel to this, Vorwerk Teppichwerke evolved into becoming one of the industry’s leading manufacturers for textile floor coverings, a position which has also lasted to this day. In 1956, Vorwerk acquired the united Smyrna Teppichwerke, a rival carpetworks, and built a large, new production venue in Gehrden near Hanover that remained in operation until 1985. In 1968, the OKA-Teppichwerke carpet factory in Hamlin was acquired – today’s site for Vorwerk Teppichwerke. Growth that offered new opportunities, and now enabled textile floor coverings to be manufactured for larger areas and objects, offices and hotels alongside carpets and wall-to-wall carpets for the home. A new sphere of activity containing plenty of leeway for the company’s unbridled power to innovate.
As a company, Vorwerk reinvents itself time and again with each decade. When “Der Spiegel”, the German news magazine, brought out an article in 1965 headlined “American Floor Reform” reporting that the West German carpet industry believed it was in danger of being “bumped off the carpet” by a huge foreign business concern, it was all about what was then a new tufting technology that an aggressive American competitor was using to elbow its way into the market. As excitement in the industry reigned white-hot, readers incidentally learned that Vorwerk had already secured this new technology for itself.
Vorwerk and art
An experimental phase began for Vorwerk with the change in society, with the changed way of producing things at the end of the 1980s. Instead of relying on historic patterns, Peter Littmann, the managing director of Vorwerk Teppichwerke at the time, banked uncompromisingly on the modern and the contemporary. New collections announced a new level of quality. Designer Rolf Heide created trade-fair booths and staged productions with which Vorwerk sent out not only a commercial but a cultural message as well. Littmann persuaded nearly 50 internationally renowned artists, designers and architects to deliver draft designs for the carpet. As an art collector and connoisseur, he successfully managed to win over Sam Francis, Michael Graves, Coop Himmelblau, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Jean Nouvel, Ettore Sottsass, Rosemarie Trockel, Zaha Hadid and others for the “Dialog Art” project, which was exhibited in 1989 at the Deutsche Architektur-Museum and at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Three accompanying volumes were published under the title “Bodenreform”, ‘flooring reform’. Collections containing designs from Jugendstil masters and from women designers at the Bauhaus followed as supplements.
Vorwerk took part in the “Citizen Office” project staged by the Vitra Design Museum in 1993. The project displayed new ways to furnish offices, a far cry from the monotony of grey-beige standard equipment. In 1998, Robert Wilson, the American stage designer, director and lighting designer, staged the “Dialog Flower Edition” from the works of additional contemporary artists and designers at the Herrenhäuser Gardens in Hanover while combining them with live allegoric scenes. When Gerhard Richter’s “Domfenster” cathedral window was inaugurated in 2007 at the Kölner Dom cathedral in Cologne, the carpet lying at the feet of the beholders was not red: It was an equally multicoloured Richter carpet from the first Vorwerk “Dialog” collection that took up and continued what was supposedly the coincidental play of colours on the ground.
To date Vorwerk Teppichwerke has worked together with over 100 internationally prominent contemporary artists and architects. With steadily growing success.
VORWERK TODAY AND TOMORROW
Know-how for individualised contract carpeting design
These days the portfolio of Vorwerk products ranges from classic velours to interesting velours variations and on to luxurious, structured articles and high-quality woven loop carpets or up-to-date interpreted shags. Alongside the processing of high-grade, high-tech fibre materials, the work with natural fibres, pure virgin wool for instance, is gaining more and more importance at Vorwerk, too.
The carpet company is utilising constantly innovative ideas to set new trends in the contract carpeting sector as well. For example, in 2008 Vorwerk is once again expanding its offer of carpet tiles suited to contract facilities. With VORWERK TEXtiles®, the carpet manufacturer from Hamlin is launching the new generation of lightweight tiles which today already comply with the coming EU standard DIN ISO 2551 for adhesive tiles. These new tiles are superior to conventional bitumen or PVC tiles, and not only because they weigh less. In future the Vorwerk name is going to be drawing attention to it in the highly valued hotel business, too. For 2009 Vorwerk has announced a 5-star Axminster collection. Above and beyond this, Vorwerk Teppichwerke uses its know-how to equally specialise in the enactment of individualised designs within the course of special-order production. Media events like the “Goldene Kamera” or acclaimed projects such as the canteen at “DER SPIEGEL”, the executive floor at Deutsche Bank or the entire fleet of new high-speed ICE express trains were and are being furnished by Vorwerk.
Quality means responsibility: Ecology and health
Since the 1980s Vorwerk has been banking in a highly targeted manner on environmentally friendly products and state-of-the-art production processes to place less of a burden on the environment. Examples of this are the introduction of fully textile backing for carpets, the first manufacturer on the market to do so, or the first environmentally friendly ‘hook and eye’ installation system, which enabled installation without using glue. Apart from these and with the exception of woollen carpets, today all Vorwerk carpets bear the seal “suitable for those suffering from allergies” awarded by the German TÜV (a technical certification association): a sign that Vorwerk products are not a source of emission for harmful substances, allergens, dust or germs. In 2006, carpets from Vorwerk were the first product on the market to even be recommended by DAAB e.V., the German Association for Allergies and Asthma, due to the effective way they bind fine particles of dust. This property has been certified by GUI, the German Society for the Environment and Interior Analysis. Since 2007 Vorwerk can label most of its products with the new fine-dust insignia issued by DAAB; the only carpet manufacturer allowed to do so until now. Vorwerk’s own, highly advanced recycling plant makes sure that a major proportion of production remnants are fed back into the production cycle, and the constant modernisation of production facilities assures exemplary figures in terms of energy consumption and pollutant emissions.
VORWERK – New | Ambience | Atmosphere
The entrepreneurial joy Vorwerk Teppichwerke displays in experimenting has not always met with acclaim from the market, nor from the culture features in the print media. But fundamental design research may well have posed an essential step for Vorwerk in moving on from an experiment to a new phase that is accompanying today’s success. With its new collections, the company is thus documenting its unbroken ability to ‘re-form’. Whereas Vorwerk carpets were known in the past primarily for their flat, uniformly closed surface areas, new structures are now being shaped on the floor. Carpet products with varying pile heights create new, stimulating attractions for both the eye and the sense of touch. In comparison to earlier collections, the ranges of colours have been toned down and reduced to up-to-date shades. Felted threads made of New Zealand virgin wool literally grow out into the room. And the collection that bears the name of today’s Art Director Ulf Moritz drives all this even further to the very utmost: Fine pearly structures, surfaces with pointedly large pile nubs and the voluminous shaggy look of the most recent luxury collection demonstrate a new self-confidence. The carpet now appears as a three-dimensional element of interior design, as a new component in the room that sharpens our tactile senses.
Today it’s not surprising that Vorwerk is giving emotionality a certain precedence over purely functional product attributes in its corporate communication. For example, a campaign bearing the slogan “New | Ambience | Atmosphere” was launched in 2008. As testimonials to the campaign, designer Peter Schmidt, publisher Angelika Jahr (“Schöner Wohnen” et al.) and architect Hadi Teherani declare that when designing interiors they have let themselves be inspired by current creations from Vorwerk.
Innovation signifies the future
Designing the future means exhibiting a readiness to innovate. Among other fields, Vorwerk expresses this through its strong involvement in the areas of textile research and new product development. Today the company is one of the leaders in its industry as a result. The development of new materials and surprising production techniques is just as much a mandate as designing innovative and health-oriented products. And Vorwerk is decisively involved in developing the working world of tomorrow, too. Within the framework of its research programme towards developing “intelligent” textile floor coverings, Vorwerk Teppichwerke received the “ZukunftsAward 2006” (‘Future Award 2006’) for the first RFID “Smart Floor” worldwide, a textile RFID underlay to control robots using RFID-based technology.
Where is the journey headed?
Besides the continuous development of innovations and consistent advancement of the Vorwerk carpet brand into the demanding luxury-brand segment, the primary focus for Vorwerk Teppichwerke has been set on an expansion of international business. For instance, with “Elemento”, the newest collection, the Vorwerk DesignTeam under the direction of Ina Struve has successfully managed to place the theme of an area rug with a fascinating long-pile look in pure virgin wool and a material weight of up to 14 kilogrammes per square metre on the market as a highly coveted luxury item. Although, Vorwerk had already laid the cornerstone for carpet design worthy of satisfying international tastes prior to this. Products capable of generating sales on an international scale arose under the art direction of Ulf Moritz - namely “Fascination”, the new Vorwerk collection for the home, and the luxury collection “Ulf Moritz” - with which Vorwerk is currently reinforcing and expanding its sales and distribution channels abroad. Vorwerk started off in the Netherlands and France in 2007, Great Britain is to follow in 2009. Viewed on a medium-term time frame, the sales and distribution activities are going to be activated and intensified in highly promising Russia, as well as in other up-and-coming eastern European nations, before the Asian and American markets are supposed to become a focus of activities for long-term planning.
Info Box
The events of the year 1883
What kind of cultural and political environment existed when the founding of the Barmer carpetworks took place? It was the year in which Richard Wagner, Karl Marx and Édouard Manet died. At this point the world could not yet have any inkling of the likes of such economists as Joseph A. Schumpeter and John M. Keynes. 1883 was the year they were born in, the same year as Benito Mussolini, later to become dictator of Italy. Krakatoa erupted in Indonesia, one of the greatest volcanic eruptions of the Modern Era. A few days before the Vorwerk brothers made their move, Emil Rathenau founded the Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft in Berlin, a company later to be renamed Allgemeine Electricitäts-Gesellschaft, today’s AEG. The prototype of lipstick was presented at the World Exposition in Amsterdam. The Orient Express departed on its first trial run from Paris to Bulgaria. Otto von Bismarck put a stop to the cultural struggle with the Catholic Church, and the German Reichstag parliament approved health insurance for workers. The Niederwald Monument was inaugurated that year, and Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí took over construction of the Sagrada Familia Cathedral which had begun the year before in Barcelona. Carlo Collodi published “The Adventures of Pinocchio”, Robert Louis Stevenson “Treasure Island”. 1883 was a year of many events, some with wide-ranging implications.
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