Girbau Brand Guidelines: The Vic Family Workshop That Became a Laundry Machine Maker

Repairs, washing machines, then hotel laundries.

Girbau is a family company from Vic, the market town of the Osona district north of Barcelona. The company dates its origins to 1920, when Pere Girbau Barbosa ran a small electromechanical workshop there; it says his son, Joan Girbau Vilageliu, then began making the first washing machines. A press release from ACCIÓ, the Catalan government’s business agency, dated 30 October 2025, also gives 1920 as the founding year. English and Catalan Wikipedia instead give 1960, the year the company says Joan’s children — Pere, Toni and Teresa Girbau — began making industrial machinery for laundries.

English Wikipedia, drawing on the company’s own history, ties that turn to Spain’s tourist boom of the 1960s, when the firm moved from appliances to laundry equipment for hotels and restaurants, sold together with after-sales service. Catalan Wikipedia says the three siblings ran the business for its first decades and led its expansion abroad. The company says it became a public limited company in 1971, made its first high-speed washing machines in 1986, and built its first tunnel washer in 1989 — the same year it opened its first foreign subsidiary, in France.

Subsidiaries followed in Cuba in 1992, the United States in 1995 and Brazil in 1997, according to the company, and later in the United Arab Emirates, Germany, China, Italy, Australia, the Dominican Republic and Portugal. The Vic newspaper El 9 Nou reported in April 2011 that Girbau had opened a subsidiary at Punta Cana in March of that year, after eighteen years of selling in the Dominican Republic through a distributor; the launch was held at a Bávaro hotel whose laundry, the paper said, was equipped entirely by Girbau. In September 2012 the same paper reported a new Portuguese subsidiary at Vila Nova de Gaia, near Porto.

From laundromat washers to tunnel lines.

Girbau sells to three kinds of customer, which English Wikipedia lists as commercial, vended (self-service) and industrial laundries. At the small end are washer-extractors and tumble dryers for hotels and laundromats; the company’s current ranges include the Genius washers, launched in 2022, the HS washers and the ED dryers. For larger laundries it makes ironers — it dates its PS ironers to 1993 and now sells the PB wall ironer — together with folders, tunnel washers such as the TBS 50, and Sortech, an automated garment-sorting system launched in 2024 that received an honourable mention in the Clean Show 2025 innovation awards, the company says.

Much of that industrial range came through acquisitions. The company says it bought the French maker Jean Michel, which built automation machinery for industrial laundries, in 2001, the year it opened an 8,000-square-metre production centre known as G3. Catalan Wikipedia lists production in Vic and at Aix-les-Bains in France, plus a plant in Shanghai run through a joint venture with the Chinese laundry maker Shenguang, which the company says opened in 2017 as Girbau Shenguang Laundry Tech.

The newest factory is in the United States. ACCIÓ reported on 30 October 2025 that Girbau had opened a plant at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, able to build 3,000 machines a year and intended to supply the American market only; until then the company had served the United States through distribution. The release put the group at seven production units and more than 880 workers. The opening followed a March 2025 agreement under which EVI Industries, an American laundry distributor, took Girbau North America into its network, according to Girbau.

The company also runs a monitoring system called Sapphire, a training programme it calls Girbau University and a sustainability programme named Gardenia, and says it received an EcoVadis gold medal in 2025.

How laundry makers present themselves.

Commercial laundry equipment is sold to two quite different worlds. At one end are laundromats, hotels and restaurants, where a row of stainless-steel washer-extractors and tumble dryers sits in plain view of customers and staff; at the other are industrial laundries, closed factories that wash for hospitals, hotels, airlines, cruise ships and workwear services. Girbau, for example, divides its business into commercial, self-service and industrial laundries, while Kannegiesser lists healthcare, hospitality and workwear among the uses for its machines.

In the industrial plants the machines become a production line. Soiled linen is sorted, carried on overhead monorails, washed in tunnel washers that move batches from chamber to chamber, then fed into flatwork ironers and folders or, for garments, steamed in tunnel finishers. Kannegiesser presents its range in exactly these terms, as one system from sorting to stacking, and in 2022 added a camera-guided robot that feeds towels into a folding machine.

For smaller customers the brand lives on the machine itself: the stainless front, the porthole door and the control panel. Girbau, for one, also sells a remote monitoring system called Sapphire. Makers speak a shared language of capacity and of water, energy and chemical use, and name their certifications and sustainability programmes prominently; the claims behind them are the makers’ own.

Many of these names remain family firms rooted in particular towns. Girbau grew from a workshop in Vic, in Catalonia, and Kannegiesser from a shed near Vlotho, in East Westphalia; Kannegiesser’s partner Montanari is a family business in Modena, in northern Italy. Several now build close to their customers abroad, as Girbau did when it opened a plant in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 2025. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — founding, ownership and where it builds — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

Three generations, then an outside president.

Girbau has stayed with the founding family for most of its history. The company says that in 2008 Mercè Girbau and Pere Girbau — daughter and son of Pere and Toni Girbau — took over general management; Catalan Wikipedia dates the handover to 2007. El 9 Nou named Mercè Girbau as the group’s director general in both its 2011 and 2012 reports, and in October 2025 ACCIÓ quoted her as president and chief executive. In 2012 the Catalan government awarded the company its Placa al Treball President Macià, a work-merit honour, according to Catalan Wikipedia, citing the government’s announcement.

The company marked its 105th anniversary at the Vic headquarters in May 2025 with factory tours for staff and their families, and says the presidents of its sixteen international subsidiaries attended. Its own figures now describe fifteen subsidiaries, seven production centres and more than 850 employees, with machines installed in more than 140 countries.

In April 2026 Girbau named Martí Giralt, previously part of the executive team at Fluidra, as its president, with Àlex Alamany, who had served as interim president, becoming corporate president. In October 2026 the company announced an agreement to buy all of FINTEC Textilpflegesysteme, a German maker of finishing, folding, sorting and internal-transport systems, with effect from January 2027; it says the two firms had worked together for more than twenty years. Girbau describes itself as family-led, and its website still presents Mercè and Pere Girbau as its top management team.

For a design guide, Girbau shows how a family workshop can grow into a group selling to laundromats and industrial laundries alike without changing its name. Compare Electrolux Professional, another maker of commercial washers and dryers, and Kannegiesser, the German family firm at the industrial end of the trade. For this guide we use a brick red, drum steel and linen with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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