Back in 1895, everything started with pickers for looms, which were also the focus of another milestone for the company:

It was in the mid-1950s that Managing Director Kurt Beck and his son Kurt-Günther – a chemist with a doctorate from Ruhrkohle AG – came up with the plan to improve the picker.

Whenever their son visited, they retreated to the attic to tinker and experiment. Together with Dr. Ziegler from the Max Planck Institute, they experimented with the composition of the plastic, tested it, discarded one plan after another and started all over again – until they finally achieved a breakthrough.

The new plastic pick ers delivered what the father-son duo had hoped for: whereas a loom used to consume around eight rawhide pickers a year, from now on it was only two plastic pickers. The service life has quadrupled! The company’s top management was proud to present the revolution at the K plastics trade show in Düsseldorf in 1955.

Thus, the pioneering new pickers paved the way for the starting material around which everything revolves for us today: plastic. And with the innovative drive that characterized the father-son duo, we want to continue to develop steadily in the future.