Two wooden huts and a water tank for coal stoves.

BLANCO began in 1925 in Oberderdingen, a village in Baden-Württemberg, as Blanc + Co. German Wikipedia, drawing on a 2008 book about the founders published by Blanco and E.G.O. and on company histories, names its founders as Heinrich Blanc and August Treffinger. The first premises were two second-hand wooden huts that Blanc had bought from a chemical works in Durlach, and the first products were water tanks for coal-fired kitchen stoves. Blanc had seen the need for them while training with the stove maker Lämmle in Bretten, which became one of the young firm’s early customers.

In 1928 the company moved into its first solid factory hall, and hot-water bottles and equipment for large kitchens joined the range. Treffinger left in 1930. From 1931 Blanc worked with the entrepreneur Karl Fischer, whose company E.G.O. moved from Oberweiler to Oberderdingen to make electric cookers; Blanco then turned largely to accessories for electric stoves, and in 1937 switched its range to pure aluminium. During the Second World War the business was placed under the war economy, and a press hall built in 1942 produced torpedo heads and field kitchens. The 2008 book records that Heinrich Blanc joined the NSDAP in May 1934. For the centenary, a company chronicle by Ingo Stader and Max Schlenker was published in June 2025.

After the war Blanco made dairy equipment and butchers’ goods, and after the currency reform it built a second works at Sulzfeld; when the first hut there burned down in 1950, a solid hall followed to plans by the Stuttgart architect Decker. In the early 1950s stainless steel became the company’s main material, used above all for kitchen sinks.

A family holding, an E.G.O. rescue and a factory in Toronto.

In 1960 Heinrich Blanc’s son Heinz Blanc took over. New plants opened at Michelfeld in 1961 and Kronau in 1962, a Dutch subsidiary followed in 1965, and in the early 1970s the company set up subsidiaries in Belgium, Austria, France and Switzerland. The 1960s range ran well beyond the kitchen, from medical bathtubs to façade panels and sinks for caravans. After the 1973 oil crisis Blanco ran into difficulty; German Wikipedia says the Michelfeld plant and several sales offices closed, and the company was saved when its long-standing partner E.G.O. acquired large parts of it, with Reinhard Fischer taking over management.

In the late 1980s Blanco founded a subsidiary in the United States and built a new household-sink plant at Sinsheim. In 1993 Frank Straub, a grandson of Heinrich Blanc, became managing director, and in 1995 the company took over the production facilities of Mirolin in Toronto to supply North America. Since 2007 two legally separate companies have traded under the BLANCO mark: the household group, and a professional group for catering and medical equipment that has used the name B.PRO since October 2021. Straub left operational management in 2009 and moved to the supervisory board.

Today the BLANCO Gruppe, a GmbH + Co KG based in Oberderdingen, is one of five company groups in the Blanc & Fischer Familienholding, which German Wikipedia describes as almost wholly owned by the Blanc and Fischer families. As of 2024 it lists four production sites: Sulzfeld and Sinsheim in Germany, Most in the Czech Republic and Toronto in Canada. Sulzfeld makes stainless steel sinks, Sinsheim makes Silgranit composite sinks, and the Most plant, completed in 2019, added Silgranit capacity. In 2019 the group also presented its “Blanco Unit” strategy, presenting itself as a supplier of complete systems for the kitchen water place across three divisions it calls Sinks, Water and Waste.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group make the fixed and movable equipment of a home: kitchen sinks and taps, shelving, closet systems, drawers and plastic storage boxes. Sink, fixture and home-storage brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to divisions of much larger industrial or retail groups, and a single name can be specified by a builder, fitted by an installer or picked off a shelf by a shopper.

A brand of this kind is usually carried less by one object than by a system: a range name, a finish, a bracket or a box that has to fit with the pieces bought before and after it. The company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factories or grown far beyond the place where it began. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Capital letters, a material name and a centenary refresh.

The name itself is the founder’s surname with an added vowel, and the company writes it in capitals: German Wikipedia gives the group’s own styling as BLANCO Gruppe. That capitalised word sits on sinks, taps and packaging across the markets the group serves, from its sales companies in Europe and North America to Singapore and Australia, where Blanco Australia Pty Ltd was set up in Sydney in 2021.

Much of the brand’s product language is built on material names rather than model numbers. Silgranit and Velgranit are the names it gives its composite sinks, set alongside stainless steel and ceramic ranges, and German Wikipedia groups the business into Sinks, Water and Waste — English words used as division names by a German company. Under the Water heading sit kitchen taps, including the newer smart taps for which the group has expanded an installation service; under Waste sit bin and organisation systems for the cabinet below the sink.

The identity was reworked for the centenary. At the start of 2025, German Wikipedia says, citing Der Küchenplaner and GV Praxis, the company changed its worldwide brand appearance, and the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung reported in April 2025 that Blanco had opened a Brand Experience Center at its Oberderdingen headquarters. A product and innovation centre on the same site, opened in 2023, brought the global product and research teams under one roof.

For a design guide, BLANCO shows how a family manufacturer can carry a founder’s name in capitals for a century while letting material names do much of the product work. Compare it with Franke, another European maker of kitchen sinks and taps, and Elkay, a Chicago sink maker that also took its name from its founders. For this guide we use graphite, brushed steel and stone white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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