The Stiegelmeyer Group – the strong family business

The commitment of the shareholders significantly shapes the company.

125th anniversary

Online editorial team Stiegelmeyer

12/02/2024

The more than 100-year connection of the Kemmler shareholder family with Stiegelmeyer is founded on love. And that’s remained so to this day. But there were also dramas. As an example, our chronicle of owners illustrates the strengths and challenges of a family-run medium-sized company: devotion, passion and cohesion, which were put to the test at intervals of many decades, often due to the change between successive generations. It is all the more remarkable that this history has resulted today in a fortunate outlook in which all elements are in place for a successful future.

The bit about love has to do with a story set in 1916 in the midst of wartime. At that time, the Stiegelmeyer factory in Herford was rented in part by the town as garrison quarters – a fact that increasingly angered the company owner Albert Dörnte. But the short stay on the company premises by the then 29-year old soldier Dietrich von Hollen was a stroke of luck, without which there would be no anniversary to celebrate today. Von Hollen, who was great grand uncle of the present proprietor Anja Kemmler, fell in love with the factory owner’s daughter Grete Dörnte. Their relationship lasted, and they married in 1920.

This was initially very advantageous for Albert Dörnte. Dietrich von Hollen from Martfeld in Lower Saxony was not only an extremely talented businessman but was also wealthy. Through marriage, he immediately became managing director and a 50 percent partner. His hard work and perseverance steered the company safely through half a century.

But, he had no sooner established himself, than the generational conflict escalated for the first time. Albert Dörnte found it increasingly difficult to get on with his son-in-law, and since the couple remained childless, he saw the company slipping away from family ownership. As a result, he tried to install his son Albert junior in the company as a secondary manager and, in doing so, exacerbated the dispute even further. In 1936, Dietrich von Hollen was finally able to buy the Dörntes out of the company.

This now allowed him to manage the fortunes of Stiegelmeyer as an uncontested patriarch – in his authoritarian, caring and humorous way that instilled a healthy respect for him in others. An example of his complete and utter identification with his company was revealed after the Second World War when British officers were billeted in his house and he summarily decided to move out into a brick shed on the company premises with his wife Grete. From there, he was even better placed to cultivate a surprisingly healthy quirk of his – namely preventing his workers from smoking. For his important contribution to the East Westphalian economy, Dietrich von Hollen was honoured with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957.

Hans von Hollen continued the work of his uncle with undiminished energy.

As a foresighted company boss, he had also not neglected to find a successor in good time. Since the 1940s, he had encouraged his nephew Fred von Hollen as a successor and also nurtured young talent such as Dietrich Tabelander and Hans Wöhrmann, who would later go on to become successful managing directors. But in the end, his quick-tempered young talent put an end to the intended succession. In 1964, when Dietrich von Hollen had already reached the age of 77, Fred left the company following a fierce argument. Another nephew jumped in to take his place and save the day: Hans von Hollen, head of department at a bank in Bremen, quickly developed the same passion for Stiegelmeyer as his uncle. Dietrich von Hollen died in 1970 at the age of 83, during a perfectly normal working day when he was about to welcome customers to the company.

Hans von Hollen cultivated a similar style of management at the company, but brought a more modern touch to the business. He transformed Stiegelmeyer to a state-of-the-art industrial enterprise and successfully introduced new beds such as the Comforta into the hospital sector, thereby shaping the image of the company for the coming decades. When it came to the matter of his succession, this also initially appeared to be far more straightforward: Hans von Hollen had a daughter Barbara who had married a successful businessman Max Kemmler in Switzerland. But the generational change in this case also turned out to be far more difficult. The young couple did not want to move from Switzerland to Herford with their two children, and Hans von Hollen categorically rejected the idea of a “long-distance relationship” with the company. When he died in 1987, he left behind a will that cemented the powers of the managing directors put in place by him and virtually excluded the real heirs from any decisions.

Barbara Kemmler-von Hollen (1941 – 1995) represented the 3rd generation of the shareholder family.

Despite certain economic fluctuations, the company continued to keep its course during the quarter-century that followed, particularly since Max Kemmler did ultimately bring his influence to bear in an advisory capacity and, for example, built up the new wooden production facility in Thuringia in the 1990s. At the start of the millenium, his daughter Anja Kemmler worked as an assistant to the managing director in Herford and got to know Stiegelmeyer from the inside out. A highlight of this interim phase took place in 2004 with the relocation of the head office from the former Annastrasse site to a stylishly modernised office building situated on Ackerstrasse, which was to become the heart of a large campus.

But in the years that followed, the relationship between the meanwhile young new managing directors and the new shareholder generation became increasingly strained. Finally, in 2011, Stiegelmeyer became a family-run company once again. First of all, Anja Kemmler took over the chair of a new advisory board, and since 2012, her husband Georgios Kampisiulis Kemmler directed the company in his capacity as Chairman of the Management Board. This was followed by a complete renewal of management structures, an upgrading of exports and the international locations and a further modernisation of production in Nordhausen and at the Polish factories in Stolno and Kepno.

The shareholder family today (from left to right): Max Kemmler, Anja Kemmler and Georgios Kampisiulis Kemmler, Chairman of the Management Board.

Today, the Stiegelmeyer Group enjoys the best of both worlds at management level: a strong, committed shareholder family who works together with competent managing directors who they have complete confidence in. The remarkable 125-year success story of our company would be unimaginable without the unwavering dedication of the Kemmler-von Hollen family.