Gotschlich Brand Guidelines: Vienna’s Family Turnstile Maker, From Ski Lifts to Stadiums

Stone-working machines and tram parts first.

Gotschlich is an Austrian company from Vienna. The firm, Karl Gotschlich GmbH, says it was founded in 1948 as a small trade business: a locksmith’s shop that built stone-working machines and repaired parts for the Vienna tramway and the city’s Stadtbahn. In 1971 the sole proprietorship became a limited company, Karl Gotschlich Gesellschaft m.b.H., and the company says the Austrian Economic Chamber honoured it in 2016 for 45 years in that form.

Turnstiles arrived as a side line. In 1974, the company says, it began its own product range next to its contract work, making turnstiles for ski lifts, used mainly in Austria. In 1978 it moved its headquarters to a new building in Vienna’s 21st district, and for a time its core business shifted to machine building, precision engineering and sheet-metal work, making machine parts to customers’ drawings.

The change from contract shop to product maker came in the 1980s. The company says it developed the turnstile further from 1980, using microcomputers and precision mechanics, because purely mechanical turnstiles, whether used for access control or for counting people, had shown their weaknesses in practice. In 1988 it developed and patented what it calls an early motor-driven three-arm turnstile, and set up its own development department under Andreas Wotke, the son of the director Heinz Wotke. By 1994, it says, it was making only its own products and had built an international sales network.

The company describes itself as a family business since 1948, and says the Wotke family is now in its fourth generation in the metal trade.

Motor drives, patents and stadium gates.

Gotschlich’s range is built around the turnstile. Its website groups the products into three-arm and two-arm turnstiles, vertical and full-height “portal” turnstiles, motorised swing gates and security gates, with barriers, fast folding gates, lane guides and equipment for paid entry and escape routes. It sells them to pools and leisure parks, museums, ski areas, factory gates, stadiums and arenas, trade fairs and public transport.

Patents are part of how the firm presents itself. It says it received the MERCUR, the innovation prize of Vienna’s business community, in 1996 for a drive system for turnstiles and doors with an integrated motor; that its Millennium sensor gate of 1999 was first installed in Vienna’s Millennium Tower; and that in 2000 it patented, in Europe and the United States, a motor-driven two-arm turnstile designed for wheelchair users. An Austrian patent filed by Karl Gotschlich GesmbH in April 2004 and published in 2006, with Andreas Wotke as inventor, covers a device for controlling the rotation of a turnstile’s star. Since 2007, the company says, all its products use its own Logiturn drive, from two-arm turnstiles to full-height portal turnstiles, and that year it also added security gates.

The firm sells mostly abroad. In a January 2018 profile published by IFEMA for the SICUR security fair in Madrid, the Austrian trade promotion agency Advantage Austria described Gotschlich as Austria’s only maker of turnstiles and access equipment since 1974, said all its products were motor-driven and put exports at about 70 per cent, mainly to European countries. The company’s own timeline gives higher shares — over 85 per cent by 2012 and 90 per cent in 2016 — and names Mexico, Singapore, Italy and Kazakhstan among its export markets.

Design and documentation.

Entrance control is a quiet corner of the building trade. Its makers sell turnstiles, speed gates, security doors and barriers to the people who plan office lobbies, stations, airports and sports grounds, and they tend to present themselves through installations rather than through logos: a row of glass gates in a tower foyer, a line of fare gates in a metro hall, a car-park barrier at a terminal.

The products fall into a few families. Glass speed gates, which open a pair of panels for each authorised person, are shown in office lobbies; full-height turnstiles, with rotors that reach above head height, are marketed for site perimeters and stadiums; mass-transit gates line metro and rail stations; and revolving security doors and portals are offered for high-risk sites. In 2026 ASSA ABLOY summed up one maker’s range as speed gates, mass transit gates and security revolving doors, which covers most of that spread.

Case studies carry much of the marketing. Gunnebo’s press releases describe speed gates fitted in Shenzhen’s Galaxy Twin Towers in 2023, and Automatic Systems’ own timeline reads as a list of metro networks, from Manila in 1983 to Stockholm in 2007. Public buyers leave a record of their own: in 2023 the Brussels transport operator STIB awarded the maintenance of the access gates in its metro and premetro stations to Automatic Systems, according to an EU contract notice.

The trade meets at security fairs. Security Essen, in Germany, held its 2026 edition and has announced the next for September 2028; Intersec, now called Intersec Global, is held in Dubai under Messe Frankfurt, with its next edition set for January 2027. Ownership is consolidating too: in August 2026 ASSA ABLOY agreed to buy Gunnebo Entrance Control, in a deal expected to close in the fourth quarter of the year.

Two Austrian plants and a German arm.

Gotschlich makes its products in Austria, it says. Its headquarters and first plant are in Vienna’s 21st district; in 2003 it opened a second plant at Straßburg, in Carinthia, where it says it mainly makes turnstiles for stadiums, and it added an apprentice workshop there in 2004 and expanded the site in 2015. The company says it works on CNC machines at both sites, mainly in chrome-nickel steel and aluminium, and that it prefers to make components in-house rather than buy them in. Its sign-off reads “Gotschlich quality products – 100% made in Austria”; that is the company’s claim.

Sales reach well beyond Austria. The company opened a sales office in Bregenz in 2008 for southern Germany, Switzerland and western Austria, built an office and training centre in Vienna in 2010 and opened an office in Moscow in 2012, according to its timeline. A German sales company, Gotschlich Deutschland GmbH, is based at Unna in North Rhine-Westphalia, and the website offers German, English and Russian versions. Its news pages show it exhibiting at the Security fair in Essen in September 2024 and, for the German company’s first time, at Perimeter Protection in Nuremberg in February 2025.

The company calls itself a technology leader in access control and a leading supplier; those are its own descriptions.

For a design guide, Gotschlich shows how a small family manufacturer can build a whole identity around one mechanism, the rotating arm. Compare Wanzl, a German family firm that also came to turnstiles from another trade, and Cominfo. For this guide we use an alpine green, brushed steel and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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