The factory is older than the glue.

UHU’s story starts with a purchase, not an invention. On its own “About UHU” page, the company says that in 1905 the pharmacist August Fischer bought Ludwig Hoerth, a small chemical factory in Bühl, in Baden, which had been founded in 1884. Die Welt, in a 2009 profile of Fischer by Britta Stuff, described the business he bought as a chemical works with an attached print shop that turned out a wide mix of goods: glues, lacquers, inks, stamp inks and even medicines.

The same Welt article says the family business came under pressure after the First World War, when its most important sales regions, Alsace-Lorraine and the Saarland, went to France. Fischer, the paper reported, put his eldest son in charge of the firm and withdrew to the laboratory to work on a new adhesive.

The result came in 1932. The company says Fischer developed what it describes as a ready-to-use, crystal-clear synthetic resin adhesive, one that bonded the materials of the day, even early plastics such as Bakelite. German Wikipedia, citing a 2012 SWR Marktcheck report, describes the formula as a solution of polyvinyl acetate in methyl acetate and acetone, and says the adhesive’s characteristic smell comes from the methyl acetate.

The name came from a bird. The company says it was customary in the paper, office and stationery trade at the time to name products after birds, and that Fischer chose the eagle owl — in German, the Uhu. Die Welt listed the animal names of that era as Pelikan, Adler, Marabu and Schwan, and recounted the legend that Fischer named the glue after hearing an owl call in the Black Forest. German Wikipedia cites a 2020 absatzwirtschaft column by Bernd M. Samland for the same naming tradition.

Ownership in three steps.

The company that grew around the adhesive took its name. According to English Wikipedia, which cites UHU’s own company history, Fischer’s firm was renamed UHU after its leading product and was taken over in 1971 by the British Beecham Group, later part of GlaxoSmithKline. A management buyout in 1989 returned it to independence, and in 1994 UHU became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Italian Bolton Group. German Wikipedia gives the same sequence and says the business now sits under a UHU Holding GmbH.

UHU’s website today describes the brand as a trademark of Bolton Adhesives, the adhesives division of the Bolton Group, which it says brings together UHU with Bison, Griffon and Air Max. The company says many of its products are manufactured in Germany and the Netherlands. The site’s copyright line reads Bolton Adhesives, part of Bolton Group.

The history has a darker chapter. In a 2014 investigation, Die Zeit named UHU among companies still in existence whose products had been tested on the shoe-testing track at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where prisoners were made to march. The paper reported that the companies said they had never heard of the tests, and that UHU said it had commissioned a historian to investigate after Die Zeit’s inquiry.

Another episode dates from the 1930s. Die Welt reported in 2009 that the hull of the airship Hindenburg, completed in 1936, was held together with UHU adhesive, and German Wikipedia describes that as a prestige boost for the brand.

Design and documentation.

Glue and correction products are among the most ordinary things in an office, a classroom or a craft drawer, and the brands behind them usually reach people through a tube, a stick, a bottle or a small dispenser rather than through anything grander. Many of these names began with a single product made to solve a particular, everyday problem, and some have since become shorthand for the whole kind of product they sell.

A brand in this category is often carried more by its name, its packaging colours and the shape of its container than by any single advertisement, and the company behind the name may have changed hands several times, been folded into a larger stationery or household group, or moved where its products are made. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and how its packaging and name have changed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time and the way its labels have developed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A yellow tube and a borrowed slogan.

UHU’s identity rests on colour. The company itself refers to “the adhesive in the black and yellow tube”, and English Wikipedia, citing Die Welt, describes the logo as yellow with black lettering, carrying in many markets the German phrase “Der Alleskleber” — the all-purpose glue. The company still writes the product’s name as “UHU The all-purpose adhesive”, and in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, German Wikipedia says, UHU is often used as a generic word for any household all-purpose glue.

The brand’s slogans have changed with the decades. Die Welt reported that Fischer wrote to schools with samples and adapted a rival’s line — Syndetikon’s claim that it glued, pasted and cemented everything — into “Im Falle eines Falles klebt Uhu wirklich alles” (“If ever the case arises, UHU really glues everything”). The company’s current motto, printed across its website, is “Glues anything, anytime”.

The range now reaches well beyond the original tube. The company groups its products by activity — handicrafts and home decoration, slime, DIY and repair, nursery and schools — and German Wikipedia lists model-building adhesives such as UHU Hart, UHU Plast and UHU Por alongside glue sticks for paper. The company says its users know UHU from nursery and primary school onwards, and describes the brand as part of domestic, hobby, school and workplace gluing.

For a design guide, UHU shows how a single product name, a bird and two colours can carry a company through changes of owner: the factory, the formula and the owl all predate Bolton’s ownership. Compare a Henkel glue stick in our Pritt brand guidelines and a French stationery house in our BIC brand guidelines. For this guide we use tube yellow and owl black with a heavy grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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