Eijsbouts began with tower clocks in 1872.

Royal Eijsbouts is one of the best-known bell foundries in the world, and the last in the Netherlands, but it did not start as one. It was founded in 1872 in Asten, a village in North Brabant in the southern Netherlands, by Bonaventura Eijsbouts, a trained watchmaker, as “de Eerste Nederlandsche Fabriek van Torenuurwerken” — the First Dutch Factory of Tower Clocks. For its first decades it made the clocks that went into church towers, not the bells that hung beside them.

The bells came later. The firm began casting its own bells only in 1947, after years of experiment by Tuur Eijsbouts, the founder’s grandson, who had joined in 1924. So the brand’s two dates mean different things: 1872 for the company, 1947 for the foundry. We keep them apart.

The family has run it throughout. Bonaventura was followed by his son Johan, who joined in 1893 at fifteen; then by Tuur; then by Tuur’s brother Max, who took over in 1962; and since 1996 by Max’s son, Joost Eijsbouts, described by the Dutch trade site Siris as the fourth generation. Siris adds that “a fifth generation Eijsbouts has meanwhile joined the company structure.”

Royal since 1972 — and the last Dutch foundry.

The firm received the Dutch “Royal” predicate — Koninklijke — in 1972, at its centenary. It has been at Driehoekstraat in Asten, its home village, since 1905, and its website describes it as “the world’s largest bell foundry and tower clock manufacturer” — a claim we attribute to Eijsbouts. For its 150th anniversary, on 10 June 2022, it cast a bell in its own courtyard — a public demonstration of the craft the firm had added to its clockmaking seventy-five years earlier.

It is now the last of its kind in the country. In February 2014 the regional paper Eindhovens Dagblad reported that Eijsbouts was taking over the activities of Petit & Fritsen, the bell foundry at Aarle-Rixtel, on the same street since 1907, which had held its own Royal predicate since 1976. The English Wikipedia describes Petit & Fritsen as “their last Dutch competitor,” and says “Foundry activities in Aarle-Rixtel were terminated and re-allocated to Asten.” The casting of two royal foundries now happens at one address. According to Wikipedia, the American firm Verdin historically contracted with Petit & Fritsen to cast its bells; Verdin now says it casts in Cincinnati.

Its work is international. Eijsbouts cast Marie, a bell of about six tonnes that became the new bourdon of Notre-Dame de Paris; it was cast in 2012, installed in 2013, and survived the cathedral fire of 2019. It cast the bell for the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games — about 23 tonnes, designed and tuned by London’s Whitechapel Bell Foundry but poured in Asten, and some 30 cm wider than Great Paul, the bell cast by Taylor’s in 1881 — seven bells for the Dom of Utrecht in 1982, and the 68-bell carillon in Berlin’s Tiergarten, which the Dutch Wikipedia ranks among the largest in the world. In 2006 it cast a bell of about 36 tonnes for a client in Japan, which the English Wikipedia describes as the largest swinging bell in the world — a superlative other sources put differently, so we hedge it.

Copper, tin and a carillon culture.

Bell metal is a bronze of roughly four parts copper to one of tin — “approximately 78% copper and 22% tin,” according to the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America, “heated in a furnace to above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.” Heritage Crafts gives the furnace temperature as 1,200 degrees Celsius.

Tin is the scarce ingredient. The US Geological Survey estimates world tin mine output at about 290,000 tonnes in 2025, led by China, Indonesia, Peru, Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and says “The estimated annual average New York dealer price for refined tin in 2025 was 1,600 cents per pound, a 13% increase compared with that in 2024.” The same survey notes that “Tin has not been mined or smelted in the United States since 1993 or 1989, respectively,” and that the US relied on imports for about 77 per cent of its refined tin in 2025.

UNESCO has recognised the music bells make, if not their casting. In 2014 it selected Belgium’s programme for “Safeguarding the carillon culture” for its Register of Good Safeguarding Practices, noting that the programme “exists in seventy-six cities and villages of Belgium and in thirty countries worldwide.” The Guild of Carillonneurs in North America counts “more than 180 carillons in North America and more than 450 elsewhere in the world.” A carillon, by the guild’s definition, has “at least 23 carillon bells,” played from a keyboard. In Britain, Heritage Crafts lists bell founding as “critically endangered,” saying it now “takes place almost solely in Loughborough” at John Taylor & Co.

A royal name over a tower clock.

Eijsbouts’s brand rests on three things: the family name, the Royal predicate, and the date 1872. The clock origin is a quiet strength — a bell foundry that began by keeping time has a story about precision built in. Its biggest single advertisement, arguably, may be a bell few will ever see up close: Marie, hanging in a cathedral that millions visit, and still there after the fire of 2019.

For a design guide, Eijsbouts shows how a family firm can carry two trades under one name and let the second overtake the first. The Royal predicate does the rest: a word granted by the state, which the firm can use and a newcomer cannot buy. It is now known for bells and carillons; its tower clocks are the older half of the business. Its strongest single fact for a brand story is Marie: a bell for the most famous cathedral in France, cast in a Dutch village by a family firm. Compare Paccard in France, which has cast bells from the start, and Grassmayr in Austria, older still.

For this guide we use a bell bronze and a parchment with a serif, an unofficial interpretation. No bell, clock face or logo is reproduced.

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