A wholesaler’s name inside a spinning group.

Austermann did not begin as a spinning mill. German Wikipedia’s history of the Schoeller worsted-spinning group describes Austermann Wolle GmbH & Co., in Wuppertal, as Germany’s largest specialist yarn wholesaler at the time Schoeller took it over, after hand-knitting sales in Germany began to fall in the second half of the 1980s. The article does not give the year of the takeover, and we found no founding date or founder for the Wuppertal business in the sources we checked, so we give none.

The buyer had a long history in hand-knitting yarn. The Schoeller family’s worsted mill in Breslau first sold it in 1884, as “Schoeller-Wolle,” German Wikipedia says. By the 1970s the group’s German company, Schoeller Eitorf AG, in Eitorf east of Bonn, had added the Esslinger and Staufen yarn brands, the second by buying the Württembergische Wollgarnfabrik D. Finkh in Süßen, near Göppingen, in 1975. Output rose until 1985, when about 1,200 staff made up to 4,000 tonnes of hand-knitting yarn a year, according to the same article.

Austermann was then folded fully into Schoeller, and its head office moved from Wuppertal to Süßen. In 1997 Schoeller’s hand-knitting business and the partly acquired Stahl worsted mill in Süßen were combined as Schoeller & Stahl GmbH, the origin of the Schoeller + Stahl brand that has sat beside Austermann ever since.

The fashion label of the group.

Inside the group Austermann was positioned as the fashion label. In October 2004 its website, run by Austermann Vertriebs-GmbH in Süßen, called the company a subsidiary of Schoeller Süssen GmbH and “one of the world’s leading wool wholesalers,” owned, like its parent, by the Swiss Albers group, the family holding that grew out of the Schoeller worsted business. It described an exclusive collection of “highly fashionable yarns” and claimed fashion leadership in its market; those are the company’s own words, in our translation.

The brand has long published its own pattern books. A November 2002 news page on the site promoted Austermann Stricktrends issue 19 alongside a Schoeller + Stahl fashion booklet, and announced that two sock yarns, Fortissima and Socka, were being joined under the Schoeller + Stahl umbrella. Later versions of the site carried the line “Austermann fashion & style.”

In October 2026 the shared website of the two brands describes Austermann as the brand “with the premium claim,” offering high-quality natural-fibre yarns “from sustainable production” with a distinctive design. Its yarns include the mohair-and-silk Kid Silk, Cashmere Cloud and Fantasy Colours, and several Austermann and Schoeller + Stahl lines are sold as GOTS-certified organic yarns. Patterns now appear in Rebecca, a German knitting magazine: the site says its issues 2/26 and 3/26 carry 28 and 31 designs from the current Austermann and Schoeller + Stahl collections. The company also publishes Maschen Reise booklets.

Where the yarn is spun is not stated. The website says “we make our quality yarns in our own production,” without naming a mill or a country, while German Wikipedia says the group stopped making hand-knitting yarn at Süßen in 1990 and at Eitorf in the early 1990s. We give the production claim as the company’s and name no place of manufacture.

Germany’s yarn trade.

The seven brands in this group all make or sell yarn for hand knitting and crochet, and they come from five countries: Knitting for Olive from Denmark, Plymouth Yarn and Universal Yarn from the United States, Jamieson & Smith from Shetland in Scotland, Austermann and GGH from Germany, and Biscotte Yarns from Canada. Between them they show how differently a yarn brand can be built.

Some yarn brands are rooted in a single place — an island flock, a town, a regional wool tradition — and their colours and fibres grew out of what that place could supply. Others are names built around design and distribution, which develop yarns and colourways and may rely on mills elsewhere to spin them. And some are dyers, who buy undyed yarn and make their mark with colour alone, in batches small enough that no two skeins quite match.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now and where its yarn is spun or dyed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A wholesaler’s name, owned by a wholesaler again.

The owner changed at the end of the 2010s. Archived copies of the shared website show its legal notice naming Schoeller Süssen GmbH, in Süßen, as late as November 2019, and Schoeller Handstrickgarne GmbH, in Limburg an der Lahn, by August 2020. We found no press report of the change, so we date it only from those archived pages. The old Eitorf works, where production ended in 2005, was sold to an investment company in August 2024, German Wikipedia says, citing the Rhein-Sieg-Rundschau.

Limburg is the home of the Textil-Gruppe Kurtenbach, a family wholesaler that says it was founded there in 1881 by Peter Kurtenbach and a partner, is now run by the family’s fourth generation and is Germany’s largest textile wholesaler. Its website calls the group the owner of three yarn brands: Austermann at the top, Schoeller in the middle of the market and the budget brand Twister. The group says it bought other wholesalers from 1989 onwards, including Wollbaer in Hamburg, and it also distributes outside brands including Regia, Schachenmayr, Opal and GGH. Schoeller Handstrickgarne, the Schoeller site says, runs its own sales organisations in Germany and Austria and sells to specialist shops elsewhere through partners. A brand that began as a wholesaler’s name is, once again, owned by a wholesaler.

The web address has a history of its own. Between 1999 and 2002 austermann.de belonged to an unrelated multimedia company, archived copies show; in October 2026 it forwards to schoeller-wolle.de, the shared site of Austermann and Schoeller + Stahl.

For a design guide, Austermann shows how a trade name can outlast several owners by holding one clear place in a range: the fashion tier. Compare Schachenmayr, another yarn name from the Göppingen district, and Lana Grossa, another German yarn house. For this guide we use plum, mauve and ecru with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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