Three initials that describe the business.

GGH, which writes its name in lower case as “ggh,” stands for Garn Großhandel Hamburg, or Hamburg yarn wholesale, and the legal name on its website is ggh – Garn Großhandel Hamburg GmbH. It calls itself “the wool brand from the far north of Germany.” For most of its recorded history it was based not in the city but in Pinneberg, a town just north-west of Hamburg, where its company is registered.

The founding year is not published. In May 2016 the company’s “About us” page said ggh hand-knitting yarns had been “a guarantee of premium quality at a good price” for “more than 30 years,” which would place its start before the mid-1980s; we found no exact date or founder in the sources we checked.

The name describes the model. GGH presents itself as a business that chooses yarn qualities and colours, in its own words, rather than as a spinning mill, and its website does not say where its yarns are spun. In February 2005 the company’s site, titled “ggh – Garne, Farben, Design,” listed stockists in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Britain, the United States, Canada and Spain. It reported on the Pitti Filati yarn fair in Florence, and it also distributed Colinette yarns, addi and INOX knitting needles and Prym accessories.

Preferred by Rebecca.

GGH’s best-known product may be a magazine. In 2016 the company said the knitting magazine Rebecca had been published by ggh “for almost 20 years,” and tied its yarns to it in two slogans, “ggh-Garn – preferred by Rebecca” and “Rebecca – fashioned by ggh.” The magazine had its own website from 2001: rebecca-online.de, which in 2006 offered back issues, a Rebecca Baby+Kids series, a special issue on knitting for the home and pattern updates, with a forum and a shop.

The yarn range is broad. The same 2016 page said ggh had about 50 qualities, from alpaca, merino and other wool, cashmere, camel, angora, silk and linen to cotton, Pima and Egyptian Mako cotton, alongside fashion and effect yarns with synthetic content. Colour is central to how the company describes itself: the page said ggh stood for quality hand-knitting yarns and for “inspiring, trend-setting shade cards,” and that the team’s enthusiasm showed in a “finely nuanced choice of colours” for every yarn and in new fashion yarns added to the classic qualities. Shade cards remain a trade tool; in October 2026 Kurtenbach still offered a 2023 ggh colour book to retailers on its website. By 2020 the website listed the ggh Wolle range, Amano yarns and the ElbSox sock yarn next to the Rebecca magazines. Its 2026 shop groups the yarns by fibre — merino, wool, mohair, alpaca and cotton — and names lines such as Samson, Maxima and Merino Deluxe.

The company has also worked with the retail trade. In September 2005 its news page said it was again a sponsor of the “mi” brand campaign for specialist shops, then in its third year, and pointed to a scarf knitted in its Velour-Lamé yarn in the women’s magazine Brigitte.

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 magazine shared, and a move into the city.

In 2026 the picture changed in ways the websites make visible. Rebecca dropped its running numbers, moving from issue 99 in autumn 2025 to 1/26, a 2/26 Baby & Kids issue with 42 designs and a 3/26 autumn issue with 31. The website of Schoeller Handstrickgarne, which owns the Austermann and Schoeller + Stahl brands, says those issues show designs from the current Austermann and Schoeller + Stahl collections, and lists earlier issues back to number 92 among its magazines. In October 2026 GGH’s own shop sold Austermann and Schoeller + Stahl yarns alongside its own, with more than a hundred Austermann products listed. Textil-Gruppe Kurtenbach, the Limburg wholesaler that owns Austermann, in turn lists GGH among the established brands it distributes. We found no document setting out a corporate link between the companies beyond this trade, so we describe only what their websites show.

The company has also moved into the city. On 1 October 2026 GGH announced that its warehouse shop in Pinneberg had closed at the end of September and that a new ggh Wolle Store had opened in the Zeisehallen, a former factory complex in Hamburg-Ottensen near Altona station, with a knitting club on Saturdays. Its legal notice now gives a Hamburg address. The online shop, in the same month, was offered in German, English and French and priced in euros for buyers across Europe and beyond.

The initials make searching harder: German Wikipedia lists GGH for, among others, the company behind the Hellerau garden city in Dresden and Canada’s Greater Golden Horseshoe region. The company’s own site is ggh-garn.de.

For a design guide, GGH shows how a wholesaler can build a brand around a magazine as much as a yarn. Compare Austermann, whose yarns now share its shelves and its magazine, and Lana Grossa, another German yarn house. For this guide we use navy, brick red and sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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