BMG LABTECH Brand Guidelines: A 1990 Offenburg Office Turned Microplate Reader Maker

A one-man engineering office in a technology park.

BMG LABTECH began in Offenburg, in the Ortenau district of Baden-Württemberg, in 1990. The Badische Zeitung reported in October 2012 that the company was founded that year as an engineering office and that it started out in the Technologiepark Offenburg. The company’s own history names the founder as the physicist Dr. Bela Gurath, who started it as a one-man engineering office.

At first, the company says, it helped other firms design components for reading and handling microplates, the multi-well trays used to run many small assays side by side. Over its first three years further shareholders joined, among them Dr. Thomas Räbiger, who leads the company today, and the small team decided to build complete instruments of its own rather than design parts for other companies. The company says it set itself the goal of becoming “the microplate reader company,” a phrase it still uses as a strapline.

The turning point, by the company’s account, came in 1993, when BMG LABTECH received a grant to develop a fluorescence measurement device and launched the FLUOstar. The company calls it the second fluorescence-based microplate reader on the market. An article on SelectScience marked the company’s 30th anniversary in January 2020, again describing its start as a small, one-man engineering office.

Microplate readers and nothing else.

BMG LABTECH is a specialist. The company says it has focused exclusively on microplate readers for more than 35 years: instruments that measure light from samples in the wells of a plate, used in life-science research and in the high-throughput screening of compounds in drug discovery. It describes itself as a medium-sized, privately owned company.

Its products are named in a consistent pattern, a short root word joined to “star.” After the FLUOstar came the POLARstar, for fluorescence polarisation; a 2017 company release, carried by News-Medical, described a POLARstar Galaxy built and installed in 1998 that was still in use at Analytik Jena, and a NOVOstar installed at the University of Leicester in 2004. The current range on the company’s website includes the PHERAstar FSX, the CLARIOstar Plus, the VANTAstar and the Omega series, alongside the SPECTROstar Nano and NEPHELOstar Plus. The company lists detection modes including absorbance, fluorescence intensity, time-resolved fluorescence, luminescence and nephelometry, depending on the model.

Its instruments have appeared in prize-winning science. When Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka received the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on signalling pathways in body cells, the Badische Zeitung reported that the two American researchers had also relied on measuring devices made by BMG LABTECH. The company says its readers have been cited in more than 16,000 scientific publications.

The brand’s visual identity changed in January 2017. A company release published by News-Medical announced a new corporate colour identity of an “elegant grey and a strong purple,” to be rolled out across all products and internal and external communications, with the company logo left unchanged; the newly coloured readers were first shown at the SLAS 2017 conference in Washington, DC. Tobias Pusterla, its international marketing manager, said the new look would unite all its microplate readers and coming launches under the purple and grey design.

Design and documentation.

Laboratory instrument makers tend to present themselves through the laboratory itself. Their pictures are usually of benchtop instruments in bright white rooms: chromatographs, spectrometers and titrators lined up on long benches, with sample trays loaded and a screen beside each one showing a chromatogram’s peaks or the curve of a spectrum. The instrument is often shown with its door open or a vial in a gloved hand, so that the scale of the work is clear.

People appear in a familiar costume. Scientists in white coats, safety glasses and nitrile gloves lean over a pipette, check a result on a monitor or load a rack of samples, and the setting is usually a clean, well-lit room rather than a factory floor. Lab automation brings its own imagery: pipetting robots moving across a deck of microplates, grippers lifting a plate from one station to the next, and close-ups of tips, tubes and wells.

The same settings recur across the category: product photographs on plain white or pale grey backgrounds, cut-away diagrams of an instrument’s inner path, and data shown as it would appear on the screen — a set of peaks, a spectral curve, a titration curve or a grid of wells coloured by result. In this kind of picture the instrument, the sample and the data carry the message, and a maker’s name usually appears as a badge on the casing or a logo in the corner.

Trade fairs remain central to how the industry shows itself. Exhibitions such as analytica in Munich, Pittcon in the United States and ACHEMA in Frankfurt bring instrument makers together on large stands, where new instruments are launched and demonstrated. The guides that follow look at what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it and how its name has changed — and keep the company’s own claims separate from what independent sources record.

Made in Ortenberg, sold through five subsidiaries.

The company left Offenburg for neighbouring Ortenberg, where it is based today in the Allmendgrün business park. In September 2016 the Badische Zeitung reported that BMG LABTECH, after years of rising sales, was putting up a new building at its Ortenberg headquarters. A company release of the same month said the building would double the manufacturing area and add space for warehousing and research and development, and that the company then employed 110 people at its headquarters and five subsidiaries.

Production stays in one place. The company says its microplate readers are conceived, developed, assembled and tested at its headquarters in Ortenberg, and the Badische Zeitung in 2012 carried a photograph of its production there. Sales and support run through subsidiaries in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan and France, and through distributors; SelectScience said in 2020 that its products were sold in more than 100 countries. The company now gives a staff figure of more than 200, and says it keeps spare parts for at least ten years after a product is discontinued.

The company remains independent and privately owned, by its own account, and Thomas Räbiger is named as managing director on its website and as its head in the Badische Zeitung reports of 2012 and 2016. Its name is written in capitals, BMG LABTECH, in its own materials.

For a design guide, BMG LABTECH shows how a narrow specialist can build a brand from one product type, a consistent naming pattern and a single colour decision applied to every instrument. Compare Tecan, another maker of plate readers and laboratory automation, and Eppendorf, a German name on laboratory benches. For this guide we use a purple, a graphite and a mid grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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