Five generations of one Franconian family.

Goebel began as a porcelain factory in Upper Franconia, in northern Bavaria. German Wikipedia says the Porzellanfabrik W. Goebel was founded on 30 January 1871 in Oeslau-Wilhelmsfeld by Franz Detleff Goebel and his son William Goebel. Oeslau is today a district of the town of Rödental in the Coburg district, and the works there gave the company its long-standing address.

The business stayed in the family for generations. German Wikipedia says William’s son Max Louis Goebel took over the management in 1911, and that in 1929 he was followed by his son Franz Goebel and his son-in-law Eux Stocke, the same year the company was converted into a limited partnership. From 1969 the next generation, Wilhelm Goebel and Ulrich Stocke, worked in the company, and the sixth generation, Christian Goebel and Detlev Stocke, held stakes in the GmbH & Co. KG set up in 1995.

Goebel’s range was never only figurines. German Wikipedia says the factory was already making figural salt and pepper shakers for the American market in the 1920s, among them a Mickey Mouse design, and that a later shaker from the 1970s took the form of Thumper, the rabbit from Walt Disney’s Bambi. Goebel’s own modellers turned the drawn originals into casting moulds. The same article illustrates an Art Deco inkwell with a blotter from the 1920s, finished in a marbled decoration and still bearing its original paper label and factory mark.

Drawings from a convent became figurines.

The product most closely tied to the Goebel name came from a young Franciscan sister. German Wikipedia says that in 1934 Franz Goebel noticed the drawings of Maria Innocentia Hummel, a nun at the Sießen convent in Württemberg, and concluded a licence agreement with the convent. Working from her pictures, and together with Sister Maria Innocentia herself, the modellers Reinhold Unger and Arthur Möller created the first porcelain figure motifs in 1935, among them the well-known “Merry Wanderer” (“Wanderbub”), a boy setting off with a bundle and an umbrella.

English Wikipedia says the figurines were introduced at the Leipzig Trade Fair and that in America they were sold at Marshall Field & Co. of Chicago, citing The M. I. Hummel Album of 1992. It says their popularity grew after the Second World War, when American soldiers stationed in West Germany sent them home as gifts, and that the figurines came to be widely collected in the United States. A Goebel Collectors’ Club was founded in the US in 1977 and, Wikipedia says, was renamed the M. I. Hummel Club in 1989 when it expanded internationally.

That chapter has since closed for Goebel. German Wikipedia says the company filed for insolvency in July 2006, citing Handelsblatt, and that in March 2007 the US investors Strategic Value Partners and Merrill Lynch took it over, after which it traded as Goebel Porzellanmanufaktur GmbH. In June 2008 it was announced that Hummel production would end, and production stopped at the end of October 2008. From February 2009 a new company, Manufaktur Rödental, made the figurines again in the old Rödental building, and Wikipedia says Goebel ended its distribution contract with that company on 1 August 2013. The M. I. Hummel figurines are now made in Rödental by Hummel Manufaktur, a separate business that the Kulmbach entrepreneur Bernd Förtsch took over at the end of 2017.

Design and documentation.

Figurine and collectable brands work with a small object and a long memory. A piece may be cast in porcelain, moulded in resin, carved from wood or shaped in felt, and it is usually made to be kept, displayed and added to rather than used up. That gives the brand behind it an unusual job: its name has to live on the underside of the piece as well as on a shop shelf.

Much of the identity of a collectable is carried by marks rather than advertising: a backstamp or base mark, a signature or sculptor’s credit, a dated series name, a box and a catalogue. Collectors use those details to tell one period or one workshop from another, so the way a maker marks its pieces can matter as much as the figure itself. The company behind a name may also have changed owners, moved its studio or changed where its pieces are made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its pieces are made and how its marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Rödental to Bad Staffelstein.

What remains under the Goebel name is the gift and home business. German Wikipedia says the “Schenken und Wohnen” (gifts and living) division of the old porcelain factory stayed with Goebel, making gift items and decorative wares, and that while production takes place outside Germany, staff in Rödental worked on the development, design and worldwide sales of the porcelain in 2010. It says the owner of the company since 2010 has been PM Kapital GmbH & Co. KG of Bad Staffelstein, which is also a shareholder in the porcelain maker Kaiser Porzellan there. Administration, purchasing and sales moved to Bad Staffelstein in 2016, and Der Neue Wiesentbote reported in September 2022 that a Goebel brand outlet had opened in the town.

Goebel works with outside designers. German Wikipedia names Charlotte di Vita, Louis Féraud, Rosina Wachtmeister and others as design partners, and says the company made salt and pepper shakers under licence for Adam & Ziege from 2005 to 2015. The company’s website today carries the line “The Art of Lifestyle” with the words “designed in Germany”, presents Goebel Porzellan alongside Kaiser Porzellan, and describes its pieces as decoration, collectibles and gifts, with lines such as Chevaux, horse figures in biscuit porcelain.

For collectors, the most useful piece of Goebel identity sits underneath the object. German Wikipedia says Goebel ceramics and porcelain can be dated even by a layperson from the base mark, because the firm changed that mark again and again over the decades.

For a design guide, Goebel shows how a factory mark can carry a brand across changes of owner, product and address. Compare it with the Spanish porcelain house Lladró and the giftware company Enesco. For this guide we use backstamp blue, bisque and terracotta with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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