JENSEN Brand Guidelines: The Bornholm Folding-Machine Maker Now Listed in Brussels

A dairy-equipment repair shop on a Baltic island.

JENSEN began on Bornholm, the Danish island in the Baltic Sea. The company’s own history and English Wikipedia both say that Ejnar Jensen founded it in 1937 as a repair shop for dairy equipment; the company adds that he started it during a period of economic recession. His son Jørn Munch Jensen started working in the business in 1954, the company says, and English Wikipedia says he took over its leadership that year.

The turn to laundry came in 1960. According to the company, the first folding machine developed by JENSEN was finished that year and installed at the Bornholm Laundry. It calls the machine the Combifolder, says it changed the focus of the company, and says 80 had been sold abroad by 1961. In the mid-1960s the range grew to include feeders and ironers, and in 1970 JENSEN introduced the Jenstack, which the company and English Wikipedia both describe as the first stacker.

The company’s account of those decades is one of a finishing specialist: machines that feed, iron, fold and stack linen after it has been washed. Its customers, it says, are textile rental suppliers, industrial laundries, central laundries and the on-premise laundries of hospitals and hotels. The business is now called the JENSEN-GROUP, and its machines carry the JENSEN name set in capitals.

“We will never get wet.”

The 1990s changed the shape of the business. JENSEN bought AB Metric Interconveyor, a maker of garment handling systems, Futurail, a maker of monorail systems, and Senkingwerk, according to both the company and English Wikipedia. The company says Senking brought it into a new product area and broke an old strategy: Jørn Munch Jensen’s line that JENSEN would “never get wet” — that it would offer only finishing machines, not washing — is still quoted inside the company today, it says, with a twinkle in the eye.

The company credits itself with other changes in the same period, among them cornerless feeding, in which an operator feeds the hem side of a sheet into the machine instead of first finding two corners; it says the method roughly doubles the number of items one operator can process compared with traditional clamp feeding. In 2008 it grouped its work on lower energy and water use under the name JENSEN CleanTech, a date English Wikipedia also gives.

The washroom range grew later. In 2015, the company says, it added stand-alone washer extractors, sold as JWE, and tumble dryers, sold as JTD, and in 2016 it introduced barrier washers, sold as JBW. Its current website groups the range into washroom, flatwork finishing, garment finishing, mat technology and robotics, and says the group can plan, build, install and service anything from a single machine to a complete turnkey laundry.

Robotics arrived through a partner. On 1 January 2018 the group took a 30% stake in Inwatec, a Danish company founded in 2009 in Odense; it added a further 40% in 2021 and, the company announced in 2026, agreed to buy the remaining 30% to own it outright. Inwatec’s systems use cameras and robots to identify garments, detect foreign objects and sort soiled textiles, the company says, and its founder now serves as the group’s chief innovation officer.

Design and documentation.

Commercial laundry equipment is sold to two quite different worlds. At one end are laundromats, hotels and restaurants, where a row of stainless-steel washer-extractors and tumble dryers sits in plain view of customers and staff; at the other are industrial laundries, closed factories that wash for hospitals, hotels, airlines, cruise ships and workwear services. Girbau, for example, divides its business into commercial, self-service and industrial laundries, while Kannegiesser lists healthcare, hospitality and workwear among the uses for its machines.

In the industrial plants the machines become a production line. Soiled linen is sorted, carried on overhead monorails, washed in tunnel washers that move batches from chamber to chamber, then fed into flatwork ironers and folders or, for garments, steamed in tunnel finishers. Kannegiesser presents its range in exactly these terms, as one system from sorting to stacking, and in 2022 added a camera-guided robot that feeds towels into a folding machine.

For smaller customers the brand lives on the machine itself: the stainless front, the porthole door and the control panel. Girbau, for one, also sells a remote monitoring system called Sapphire. Makers speak a shared language of capacity and of water, energy and chemical use, and name their certifications and sustainability programmes prominently; the claims behind them are the makers’ own.

Many of these names remain family firms rooted in particular towns. Girbau grew from a workshop in Vic, in Catalonia, and Kannegiesser from a shed near Vlotho, in East Westphalia; Kannegiesser’s partner Montanari is a family business in Modena, in northern Italy. Several now build close to their customers abroad, as Girbau did when it opened a plant in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 2025. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — founding, ownership and where it builds — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

A Danish family name, listed in Brussels.

JENSEN-GROUP NV is a Belgian company listed on Euronext Brussels under the ticker JEN, according to English Wikipedia and the company’s investor pages, which in autumn 2026 were still reporting weekly share buybacks on that exchange. Its shareholder table, updated in November 2026, shows JENSEN Invest holding 44.2% of the shares; the company names JENSEN Invest as its de facto controlling shareholder. Its website is operated by JENSEN Holding AG of Burgdorf, Switzerland, and its chief executive is Jesper Munch Jensen.

A Japanese partner holds a fifth. In March 2023 JENSEN and the Japanese company Miura agreed a joint venture under which JENSEN took 49% of Inax, Miura’s wholly owned subsidiary and a maker and distributor of heavy-duty laundry equipment in Japan; the British trade paper Laundry & Cleaning Today reported that the agreements were signed on 9 March 2023. The November 2026 shareholder table lists Miura Co. Ltd with 20.0% of JENSEN-GROUP.

The group has kept buying. In 2024, the company says, it took a majority stake in MAXI-PRESS Holding GmbH, a maker of press cushions and other laundry consumables. In December 2025 Laundry & Cleaning News reported that JENSEN North America had acquired the business of G A Braun, a laundry equipment maker founded in Syracuse, New York. A new company, JENSEN Braun LLC, took over its assets, and the two brands were to continue side by side. The paper quoted Jesper Munch Jensen as saying the aim was to align production capacity with sales growth by expanding the manufacturing base in the USA; JENSEN North America now manages JENSEN Braun in Syracuse and JENSEN USA in Panama City, Florida, the report said.

On manufacturing more broadly, the company says it is organised into six business regions whose factories develop, produce and deliver its products, sold through its own sales and service centres and through authorised local distributors.

For a design guide, JENSEN shows how a family name from a Baltic island workshop became an industrial brand set in capitals. Compare Kannegiesser and Girbau, two other makers of commercial laundry equipment. For this guide we use a deep fjord blue and a steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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