Lavatec Brand Guidelines: The Heilbronn Laundry-Machine Name Restarted in 2010

A laundry-machine maker in the Heilbronn district.

Lavatec began in 1986, when LAVATEC GmbH was founded in Bad Rappenau, a town in the Heilbronn district of Baden-Württemberg, according to the company’s own history. Its timeline says LAVATEC Inc. was founded in Naugatuck, Connecticut, in 1987 to supply the North American market, and that a branch was opened at Sarstedt in Germany to serve demand in Europe.

Growth came through acquisitions, by the company’s account. It bought the French maker Ferlay France, which became LAVATEC France; in 1998 it bought Spencer Dunnewolt in the Netherlands; and it bought Washex Inc. in Texas, which extended its range in North America. In 2001, it says, it enlarged its production area from 6,000 to 13,000 square metres to raise capacity.

The name also became visible outside the laundry trade. German Wikipedia records that Lavatec was the main sponsor of Heilbronn’s ice-hockey club, the Heilbronner Falken, from 2006, and that in 2007 it took over the naming rights to the city’s ice rink, which then became the Lavatec Arena.

Insolvency and a restart.

That first company did not survive. German Wikipedia dates the insolvency of Lavatec GmbH to the spring of 2009, after which the rink lost its main sponsor and namesake and was called Eisstadion Heilbronn until January 2012. In the United States, the old subsidiary Lavatec Washex Inc filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2009, Laundry & Cleaning News reported.

The brand was revived a year later. On 24 June 2010 Laundry & Cleaning News reported that Lavatec Laundry Technology had resumed the development, production and sales of the Lavatec brand with effect from 1 June 2010, with Wolf-Peter Graeser as its new owner and managing partner. The paper quoted a statement from the receivers, Schultze & Braun, welcoming the outcome of lengthy negotiations, and reported that Graeser had come from the automotive supplier Magna International and had been chief executive of Lapple AG, a Heilbronn sheet-metal processor, from 2004 to 2008.

The new company bought the production and administrative buildings in Heilbronn and started with 30 staff, the paper reported, and it planned a range running from continuous batch washers and washer-extractors to presses, centrifuges, dryers, ironers, feeders and folders. A German parent company was set up, with new subsidiaries in France, replacing the former Lavatec subsidiary in Lyon, and in Italy; the Sarstedt site, which had made a rail system for laundry bags, was sold. In the United States, Lavatec Laundry Technology Inc. was founded in the week of 21 June 2010, and Graeser told the paper it was a new company with “absolutely no relation and no liabilities” to the old Lavatec. The paper added that the company expected to attend the Expo Detergo trade show in Milan that year and planned to revive the Lavatec Open House exhibitions at its Heilbronn manufacturing headquarters.

The company’s own history calls the step a “restart with tradition”: Lavatec Laundry Technology GmbH was formed by acquiring the assets of the former LAVATEC, and several subsidiaries were set up at the same time.

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.

“Made in Heilbronn.”

Today the company’s legal notice names Lavatec Laundry Technology GmbH, based in Heilbronn, with two managing shareholders, Wolf-Peter Graeser and Mark Thrasher; its website presents them as “die Doppelspitze,” the twin leadership. It also lists an American office at Beacon Falls, Connecticut, and the company says it runs its own subsidiary in the USA and reaches other markets through distribution and trading partners.

On manufacturing, Lavatec makes a plain claim. Its machines, it says, are made entirely in Germany at its Heilbronn site, from welding the frames through assembly to final acceptance, in its own production hall, and it says it deliberately relies on manual production and careful quality checks. It sums this up as “Made in Heilbronn.”

The range centres on the washroom: washing, removing water and drying. Its website lists LX washer-extractors, the LT tunnel washer for batches of 35 to 100 kg, LP presses and TT transfer dryers, alongside centrifuges, front-loading and cascade dryers, conveyor systems and software for controlling a whole laundry. Its timeline adds the LAVAPress 597 S, which it describes as working at 60 bar with a basket about 1.2 metres across, and a tunnel washer for batches of up to 130 kg. Customers, it says, include large commercial laundries, hotels, hospitals and industrial firms.

Its design recognition is documented. The Red Dot website lists the Lavatec TT745 industrial dryer as a winner of the Red Dot Design Award in Product Design 2012, with the design credited to Design Tech (Jürgen R. Schmid) of Germany; it describes a fully automatic dryer for loads of 50 to 150 kg, run from a touch panel and heated by gas, steam, hot oil or hot water. The company’s own timeline links the award to its TT EcoDry dryer.

For a design guide, Lavatec shows how a brand name can outlast the company that created it. Compare Kannegiesser and JENSEN, two other makers of heavy-duty laundry equipment. For this guide we use a deep teal and a copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Lavatec’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.