Ibelo
Ibelo was a German company from Sulzbach am Main . It was the largest lighter factory in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s .
History of the company
The story of Ibelo in Sulzbach begins after the end of the Second World War. Hermann Zahn took over the company in 1938 from the brothers Julius and Benno Loewenthal. The two had founded the company in Frankfurt in 1919 and had to flee from Germany to England because of their Jewish origins; there they founded their own lighter company. It is from them that the name Ibelo originates from the initials of the two brothers. After a forced break during the war years, Zahn resumed production in his home town of Sulzbach towards the end of the 1940s, back then in a shed next to his parents' house.
Even before the war, Zahn had launched a completely new ignition system for lighters. Now he set out to market this idea. Thanks mainly to good contacts abroad, his company experienced a rapid upswing. Soon, under the name “Colibri”, lighters from Sulzbach were exported all over the western world. After two company expansions at the beginning of the 1950s, the Ibelo building was erected in Sulzbacher Hauptstrasse in 1956. The main building on Jahnstrasse followed nine years later.
In 1973, Ibelo was the largest producer of lighter in Europe. In 1976 they exported to 53 countries worldwide and 420 people were employed at the Sulzbach site.
After Hermann Zahn's death in 1984, his sons Walter and Werner Zahn (who had become known nationwide through his marriage to Marika Kilius ) took over the management.
In the 1980s, there were increasing signs of a downturn. The invention of the disposable lighters and cheap production in Asia heralded the end of the Ibelo. In 1986 the "Ibelo Metallwarenfabrik" had to file for bankruptcy. The new owner Emil Stiltz gradually reduced production until he finally dismissed the remaining employees in 2000 because the external sales company also became insolvent.
Today the remainder of the stocks are still sold worldwide via a north German company. After years of vacancy, the former company building was demolished in 2009 on behalf of the municipal administration; the site has been fallow since then and is to be redesigned.