Germany's strangest world champions: the small firms that quietly own odd niches
Ship propellers from a lake town, Christmas stars from a church village, the trolley sketched on a flight home. A tour of German niche champions and the stories behind them.
Ask people what Germany makes and you will hear about cars, machine tools and chemicals. Ask where the propeller on a giant container ship was cast, who folds the star in a Saxon window at Christmas, or whose machine packed the tea bag in a hotel room on another continent, and the answers lead to towns most readers have never heard of. This is a tour of those places. Every firm below is small or mid-sized, most are family-owned, and each holds a position in a niche so specific that it sounds like a pub quiz question. Where a company calls itself a world leader, we say so and say who said it.
The propeller makers of Lake Müritz
Waren an der Müritz is a resort town in the lake district of Mecklenburg, better known for sailing boats than for heavy industry. Yet Mecklenburger Metallguss casts some of the largest ship propellers on earth there. In September 2018 a floating crane in Hamburg lifted a 110-tonne MMG propeller, 10.5 metres across, onto a ship bound for Korea, where it was fitted to one of MSC's 23,000 TEU container ships. The company has made propellers of more than 130 tonnes.
What most people do not know: commercial shipbuilding left Europe decades ago, but its propellers did not. In a 2023 interview with Unternehmeredition, managing director Lars Greitsch described MMG as the only European maker of propellers of this size and world market leader above 80 tonnes, with about 95 per cent of output going to Asian shipyards. Roughly 210 people work there.
A Christmas star born in a maths lesson
The Herrnhut star, with its 25 points, began as teaching material. In the early 19th century a mathematics teacher at a boarding school of the Moravian Church used paper stars to explain geometry. A Herrnhut bookseller, Pieter Hendrik Verbeek, started selling them in 1897 and in 1925 applied for a patent on a version that could be packed flat and posted.
What most people do not know: the German Patent and Trade Mark Office records that the Nazi state halted production in 1940 and that the East German regime nationalised the maker in 1950. In GDR times most stars were exported, so families in East Germany often found them only under the counter. Herrnhuter Sterne relaunched in 1991 with 23 employees and now sells hundreds of thousands of hand-folded stars a year.
The trolley drawn at 30,000 feet
Rudolf Wanzl's family were expelled from the Sudetenland after the war and started again in Leipheim, Bavaria, in 1947, repairing scales. A basket order from the cash register maker NCR pulled them into self-service retail. In 1951, on a flight home from the United States where he had met the shopping cart pioneer Sylvan Goldman, Wanzl sketched a basket fixed onto a wheeled frame. The company even remembers the seat: row 14, window, on the left. The design was patented that year as Concentra.
What most people do not know: trolleys are less than half the business. Monocle reported that they accounted for about 40 per cent, with the rest coming from airport luggage trolleys, hotel carts, shop fittings and security gates. Wanzl is described by Monocle and Wikipedia as the world's largest shopping trolley maker, and it is still fully family-owned.
The fish food that built a hobby
In the 1950s Germany had, according to Wikipedia, only about 50,000 people keeping aquarium fish, and they had to catch live food in streams. Dr Ulrich Baensch, a young scientist, launched TetraMin in 1955: four kinds of flakes plus vitamins, hence the name. Trade magazine PET worldwide calls it the world's best-selling fish food.
What most people do not know: this very German product has been American-owned for half a century. Tetra was sold to Warner-Lambert in 1974, passed via Pfizer and the Triton fund, and has belonged to Spectrum Brands since 2005. Spectrum's 2025 annual report confirms most Tetra products are still made in Melle, Lower Saxony.
The tea bag inside the tea bag
The W-folded, two-chamber tea bag with a string and no staples was patented by Teekanne in 1949. Its engineer Adolf Rambold then built Constanta, the first fully automatic machine for the format.
What most people do not know: the real champion is the machine maker. Teekanne's sister firm Teepack calls itself world market leader and says it has delivered more than 3,000 double-chamber packing machines to over 50 countries. Many double-chamber bags sold under rival brands were packed on Düsseldorf machines.
The air in a firefighter's cylinder
Bauer Kompressoren was founded by Hans Bauer in his Munich home in 1946. It builds high-pressure compressors that fill breathing-air cylinders for divers and fire brigades. The company calls itself a world market leader in high-pressure compressors, and the industry portal chemeurope, citing company data, puts its share of breathing-air cylinder compressors above 70 per cent. It remains family-run in its third generation.
Bells cast by the same family since 1590
In Sinn, a village in central Hesse, the Rincker family has cast bells since 1590, according to the foundry. They still use loam moulds instead of sand. A mould takes about eight weeks to build and the bell cools in the pit for at least two more, the Deutsche Handwerks Zeitung reported in 2024. The family moved to Sinn in 1817 for one reason: the quality of the local clay.
Cards from the town that invented Skat
Skat, Germany's national card game, was developed in Altenburg, Thuringia, in the 1810s, and the International Skat Court still sits there. So does a card factory licensed in 1832. ASS Altenburger, owned since 2002 by Belgium's Cartamundi, said in 2017 that it printed almost 40 million decks a year in Altenburg.
The curtain behind the curtain
Gerriets, near Freiburg, began as a textile wholesaler in 1946 and drifted onto the stage when its founder managed the rebuilding of the Freiburg theatre. Today it weaves fabrics up to 12.45 metres wide and welds projection screens without visible seams. Its OPERA screen material, says the company, grew out of a request from the Paris Opera in the 1960s.
Organs from Beethoven's street
Klais has built pipe organs in Bonn since 1882 and is now led by the founder's great-grandson. Its instruments sound in Cologne Cathedral, Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie, Symphony Hall in Birmingham and the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, which, at about 6,500 pipes, is described as China's largest organ.
A filter invented for car batteries
In 1966 Heinz Hankammer built his first water filters, by his company's account under a pear tree in his garden in Taunusstein, Hesse. The first product had nothing to do with drinking. Called AquaDeMat, it used ion exchange resin to demineralise water for car batteries at petrol stations. Hankammer then asked whether the same chemistry could work in a kitchen. In the early 1970s the company launched what it describes as the first water filter jug for household use, with patented replacement cartridges, and later renamed itself after his daughter, Brita.
What most people do not know: BRITA says it became the first company in its industry to collect and recycle used cartridges, back in 1992. It remains a family firm, led since 1999 by the founder's son Markus Hankammer, and sells in 69 countries.
Two big names in surprising side roles
Some champions hide inside famous companies. Since 1980 Kärcher has cleaned historic monuments free of charge, more than 300 projects by its own count, including Mount Rushmore, the colonnades of St Peter's Square, the Brandenburg Gate and Christ the Redeemer in Rio. At Mount Rushmore in 2005, five hot-water machines ran for four weeks, pumping about 7,000 litres a day.
Ottobock, the prosthetics maker, has run the technical repair service at every Summer and Winter Paralympic Games since Seoul in 1988. In Paris in 2024 it fielded 164 technicians from 41 nations speaking 32 languages, shipped 23 tonnes of equipment and carried out somewhere between 2,700 and just over 3,000 repairs, depending on the count, mostly on wheelchairs.
And the harmonica
Finally, a small Swabian town once made 20 million harmonicas a year. Hohner and Trossingen deserve their own story, which you can read in our companion piece on the Marine Band and the harmonica town.
What connects them
Three patterns repeat. First, many of these firms were refounded after 1945, by refugees, by families starting again in ruined cities, or by East German firms that survived nationalisation. Second, they grew by exporting a single idea very far: a propeller, a star, a fold in a tea bag. Third, ownership is more varied than the Mittelstand myth suggests. Wanzl, Rincker and Bauer are family firms, while Tetra is American-owned and ASS Altenburger is Belgian. The German part is often the place, the people and the know-how, rather than the shareholder register.
Sources
- Unternehmeredition: Immer eine Handbreit Wasser unterm Kiel
- Marine Insight: HHLA loads world's biggest ship propeller
- DPMA: The Herrnhut star
- Wanzl: Row 14, window seat on the left
- Monocle: Wanzl, world's biggest trolley maker
- Tetra: Company history
- SEC: Spectrum Brands Form 10-K FY2025
- Teepack: Company
- chemeurope: Bauer Kompressoren GmbH
- Deutsche Handwerks Zeitung: Glocken für die Heimat
- Wikipedia: ASS Altenburger
- BRITA: Group history
- Gerriets: Company history
- Kärcher: Sponsoring
- IronPros: A new look for American presidents
- Ottobock: Paralympics engagement