Wilkhahn

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Wilkhahn Wilkening + Hahne

logo
legal form GmbH & Co. KG
founding 1907
Seat Bad Münder am Deister
management Jochen Hahne
Number of employees 600
sales 84 million euros (2018)
Branch Furniture
Website www.wilkhahn.de

The Wilkhahn Wilkening + Hahne GmbH & Co. KG is a German furniture manufacturer based in Bad Munder am Deister .

"ON" office chair from Wilkhahn

company

The company was founded in 1907 as a chair factory in Bad Münder near Hanover by Friedrich Hahne and Christian Wilkening. The company name Wilkhahn was derived from their family names. For almost 40 years, the manufacturer produced seating furniture from solid beech. From 1946 the sons Fritz Hahne and Adolf Wilkening took over the management. From then on, they shaped the company through corporate social responsibility and the move towards a modern design language, thereby establishing Wilkhahn as an international brand.

With the introduction of a company pension scheme (1954), affordable corporate loans for employees and finally a 50 percent profit sharing for employees (1971), Fritz Hahne became a role model for social entrepreneurship alongside entrepreneurs such as Philipp Rosenthal and Reinhard Mohn.

The company is still family-owned today, and the works council chairman represents the interests of the employee holding company on the advisory board. To develop new products, Fritz Hahne initiated a series of collaborations with well-known architects and designers from the 1950s onwards. The formerly regional craft business experimented with new materials, found its own design language and gradually advanced to become an internationally known office furniture manufacturer. As early as the 1960s, the issues of environmental awareness and the longevity of the products came to the fore in the corporate philosophy. "When in doubt, the ecological aspect is more important than fast profit" , the Board decided in 1989. The company was awarded for the comprehensive and holistic ecological change in 1996 with the German Environmental Award of the DBU.

In 1993, Jochen Hahne joined his father's family business, Wilkhahn, where he became managing director in 1997 and chairman of the board in 2000. Under his direction, internationalization was expanded with subsidiaries in Australia , Dubai and the USA , the “Future of Work” project was implemented at EXPO 2000 , and a modern company pension scheme was implemented as a profit-related employee participation.

Wilkhahn currently employs around 500 people worldwide (as of May 2014). Over 70% of total sales are achieved outside of Germany. In addition to the production facility in Bad Münder, Lower Saxony, Wilkhahn furniture is also produced in Castellón de la Plana, Spain, and in Sydney , Australia.

Office building in Eimbeckhausen

Product history

After initially specializing in solid wooden chairs, product design changed from the 1950s. In close cooperation with the Deutscher Werkbund and the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) in Ulm, Wilkhahn based itself on the motto "to develop long-lasting products, to increase the practical value and to reduce waste". Designers such as Roland Rainer , Hans Bellmann, Walter Papst , Herbert Hirche and Georg Leowald shaped the company's new design language. The use of new materials such as fiberglass , polyester and steel resulted in an avant-garde product range inspired by industrial design. In the 1970s, the focus expanded to the design of ergonomic office chairs. After the introduction of the articulated chair 232/6 by Wilhelm Ritz at the beginning of the 1970s, the “FS line” designed by Klaus Franck and Werner Sauer in 1980 became the first intuitively operated office chair with synchronized automatic function as a model for a whole generation of office chairs. In the 1990s, the designer Andreas Störiko developed the first flexible folding table for the Confair range for flexible communication spaces that reflect the changing world of work. The company's new ecological orientation also made itself felt in product development: the “Picto” swivel chair, introduced in 1992, was recognized as the first office chair for its implementation under consistent consideration of ecological criteria. With the “ON”, Wilkhahn introduced an office chair concept in 2009 that encourages the entire body to move naturally when sitting. The chair development was accompanied by Ingo Froböse from the Center for Health at the German Sport University Cologne . In 2012, the ON office chair was awarded the Federal Ecodesign Prize, awarded by the Federal Environment Agency and the Federal Environment Ministry.

architecture

In 1959, Wilkhahn and architect and Werkbund member Herbert Hirche built a Bauhaus- inspired administration building in the Eimbeckhausen district of Bad Münder . A visible concrete structure with an infilled clinker facade characterizes its appearance. With plans by the architect Georg Leowald , new production and storage halls as well as a boiler house were built at the same time, which was built according to the skin and skeleton principle. In 1988 Wilkhahn expanded its production facility with buildings designed by the architect Frei Otto . The multiple award-winning four tent-like pavilions were designed with a wooden suspended roof construction and thus enable flexible use: whether as production halls, exhibition rooms (as part of EXPO 2000 ) or as administration and work environment for the Wilkhahn manufacture for custom-made products.

The halls, opened in 1993 by architect Thomas Herzog , visibly express the company's ecological standards right through to the design of industrial production facilities. Optimal use of daylight, natural ventilation, wooden construction and the use of solar panels were decisive for the design of the building. Four “wooden trestles”, in which there are offices, divide the floor space into three equal, column-free halls and enable short distances between production and administration. These production halls also received numerous architectural prizes and are still considered exemplary today. In 2006, the Hanover architects Pax Brüning revised and added to the reception situation at the “Hirche-Bau” in Eimbeckhausen. In 2007 Wilkhahn built a block-type thermal power station . It works with cogeneration based on renewable raw materials and with an efficiency of over 80%. The power plant feeds energy into the local power grid, its waste heat is used to heat the buildings on site. In addition Wilkhahn uses the district heating of an adjacent biogas plant, so that the CO 2 emissions by over 50% could be reduced.

Awards

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Euwid: Wilkhahn is growing above all in other European countries , February 14, 2019
  2. ↑ Angela Holland: Employee Participation- A Management Concept? Diploma theses agency, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-8386-0385-0 , p. 56 f.
  3. ↑ Examples of employee participation in German companies , welt.de
  4. ↑ Updated environmental statement , Wilkhahn
  5. ↑ Announcement on the German Environment Prize for Wilkhahn ( Memento of the original from July 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , German Federal Foundation Environment @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.dbu.de
  6. ↑ Ingo Froböse: The new freedom of sitting. ( Memento of the original from July 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Das Büro - the magazine for office excellence. Frank Nehring Verlag, Berlin, June 2009. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / officeabc.blogstrasse.de
  7. ↑ Prize winners 2012 , Federal Ecodesign Award
  8. ^ Production pavilions of the Wilkhahn company in Bad Münder. freiotto-architekturmuseum.de
  9. ^ Hugh Pearman: World Architecture Today. Phaidon, Berlin 2002, ISBN 0-7148-9136-3 , pp. 315-316.
  10. ↑ Through wind and weather - The Wilkhahn production halls after fourteen years. ( Memento from September 10, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) In: pro: Holz: Zeitschrift Schneid. 21, 2006, p. 22.

Coordinates: 52 ° 14 ′ 10.2 "  N , 9 ° 24 ′ 19.6"  E