75-year anniversary

75 years ago, in April 1949, the success story of the Brand Group began at Reinhardshof in Wertheim. The beginnings were adventurous for the time. Rudolf Brand, who had fled from the then Soviet-occupied Thuringia, founded his company BRAND in a former barracks. A few days later, Helmut Schöler, an honorary citizen of Wertheim who died in 2020, joined the company as its first apprentice. Together with their employees and other entrepreneurs, both men shaped Wertheim's rise to become a leading location for the glass industry.

From the very beginning, the Wertheim glass industry focused on laboratory applications, e.g. in the pharmaceutical industry or chemical analysis. Helmut Schöler quickly established business contacts all over the world for BRAND and initially traveled to his customers by scooter, later also by ship and propeller plane. He recognized the importance of brand quality early on and created BLAUBRAND®, one of the first globally known brands in the laboratory sector.

But it didn't stop at glass: as early as the 1960s, BRAND took the plunge to become a liquid handling company and introduced a completely new technology to laboratories. Mechanical pipettes and dispensers made laboratory work simpler, less complicated and more efficient. Precise volumetric glassware and liquid handling devices are still an important part of BRAND's business today. On the nearly 80,000 square meter factory site on Otto-Schott-Straße, pipetting robots are also built today, software is developed, and plastic products for life science applications are manufactured in one of the largest cleanrooms in the laboratory industry.

VACUUBRAND was founded in the early 1960s as a trademark of the BRAND company in Wertheim. Since then, we have been passionately dedicated to the development of innovative vacuum technology. The business expands so strongly in the following years that VACUUBRAND GMBH + CO KG is spun off as an independent company on January 1, 1985. The focus on chemical process engineering and product innovations such as the first chemically resistant diaphragm pump, innovative vacuum controllers and the first chemically resistant screw pump were groundbreaking for the development of VACUUBRAND.

BRAND INTERNATIONAL, the shared services company of the Brand Group, is another company represented in Wertheim. The IT, Finance, Controlling, Purchasing, Human Resources and Legal departments ensure smooth processes and make a decisive contribution to the success of the operating units in the Group. Today, around 1,000 employees work for the Brand Group worldwide, the majority of them in Wertheim.

One constant in the company's development is “Made in Germany”, for which the Brand Group stands. The technological base in Wertheim is being systematically expanded, for example through multi-million investments in new production facilities and a logistics center. “Our customers in the laboratory want to work simply, easily and efficiently with perfect quality. We are proud of our employees, who work with commitment and creativity to achieve this. We value the knowledge and experience of each individual. We are building our future on this,” says Dr. Christoph Schöler, who manages the Brand Group together with his son Dr. Constantin Schöler.