Unusual product ideas from Stiegelmeyer

Unusual product ideas

125th anniversary

Online editorial team Stiegelmeyer

12/02/2024

Beds and more: that’s been our maxim at Stiegelmeyer since 1900. We have always offered a whole world of furniture, mattresses, accessories and service solutions around our core product focus on beds. Particularly in the digital age, it is more important than ever to develop into a comprehensive global provider of solutions. But sometimes the company's creative spirit resulted in very unusual approaches.

Motor-actuated beds were still a long way off in the year 1924. Our designers had something even more bold and racy on their mind, however, when they came up with a motorcycle! Sporting only 3.8 HP and a two-speed gearbox, the “Stiegelmeyer type motorcycle” may not have exactly been a skyrocket, but the technical drawing reveals a sleek beauty that would likely thrill many collectors today. And that despite the extremely economical bed frame tubing used to build the bike.

The president of Minden county was convinced of the design draft and pronounced his approval for series production. Unfortunately, what then happened next at Stiegelmeyer remains completely unknown. Was there a prototype? Were any models of the motorcycle sold? Probably not: no documents or photographs are preserved, and an actual Stiegelmeyer motorcycle has never appeared in reality. Presumably, the project was deemed by company management to be too uncertain after all, and the company preferred to invest in purchasing a factory for wooden furniture.

The idea of using bed tubing in vehicle manufacture lived on successfully, however. In the 1930s, Stiegelmeyer delivered parts to make the frames of “Tinion bicycles” at the bicycle factory Heinrich Tiemann in Eilshausen. Contrary to the Stiegelmeyer motorcycle, this bicycle can still be found on the Internet – and old components are still up for purchase on bike enthusiasts’ sites.

All set for garden parties during the economic miracle: Stiegelmeyer patio furniture was a great success.

The economic miracle of the 1950s gradually gave rise to a middle-class idyll, for which Stiegelmeyer delivered the perfect products in the form of fold-out beds and space-saving furniture. It is less well-known, however, that our company also had great success with garden furniture during that era. Customers were thrilled with our sunbeds, outdoor chairs and our trendy Hollywood swings, in particular. Just like the motorcycle, this furniture was also made of steel bed tubing, and you could be forgiven for thinking that the sunbeds with their adjustable backrests and thigh rests looked somewhat similar to a hospital bed on summer holiday. A marvellous detail was the integrated fabric canopy over the sunbed.

The Stiegelmeyer general catalogue of 1959 listed no fewer than 14 types of garden furniture. The glamour of the heyday of cinema was conjured up in a marketing text from that time: “Sonja Ziemann, Ruth Leuwerik and Maria Schell all took their seats in Stiegelmeyer furniture at one time or another”, it gushed. We cannot tell today whether this was true, but we can safely say that cocktails will have tasted particularly good when seated comfortably in product number 4480 – the Hollywood swing. What is beyond doubt is that thousands of citizens must have taken a seat in the sturdy chairs that Stiegelmeyer sold to the ice-cream parlours of the day.

Bella Napoli from Eastern Westphalia: Ice cream parlour furniture from Stiegelmeyer was very successful in the 1960s.

While film stars sunned themselves in the garden, schoolchildren sat indoors and did their homework – in classrooms that were equipped by Stiegelmeyer. The school furniture range of the 1940s and 50s was an unusual project. “School chair made of steel tube, wooden parts made of beech plywood, four wooden feet”, stood in the general catalogue. The teachers sat on the same models, in principle, but “with armrests”. To go with the chairs, there were adjustable desks with storage trays for writing utensils and an “upright blackboard on a stand, that can be swivelled and fixed in every position”. These descriptions sound like a standard that was far ahead of its time and was certainly not typical even in the 1970s or 80s. Unfortunately, the range did not meet with “any significant economic success”, as our chronicle notes.

The best conditions for successful learning: school furniture from Stiegelmeyer.

The discontinuation of the space-saving, garden and school furniture in the 1960s marked the end of the era of slightly “quirky” product ideas at Stiegelmeyer. Although the portfolio grew broader and more individualised, this growth was strictly aligned with the requirements of healthcare and nursing care. There will be no going back to the motorcycle or the Hollywood swing, but perhaps future digital developments will give rise to products which we cannot even imagine at the present time.