Haag-Streit Brand Guidelines: Bern’s 1858 Workshop, the Slit Lamp and Goldmann

A Bern workshop before the eye.

Haag-Streit dates its history to 1858, when two precision mechanics, Hermann Studer and Friedrich Hermann, set up a mechanical workshop in Bern. The company says their optical, physical and surveying instruments were precise enough that the firm was asked to equip Switzerland with weather stations and to make a Swiss prototype of a metric scale. Its history page points to a large precision scale of 1864, made for the Swiss calibration office, and to the meteorological column of 1873 on the Münster platform in Bern. It also made theodolites, setting-out tripods and sighting lamps for tunnel building, including the Simplon tunnel, and coordinatographs for drawing maps, for more than a century.

German Wikipedia says the firm’s first international success was an order in 1867 for weather instruments for the central physical observatory in St Petersburg, and that it began making instruments for ophthalmology after a move of premises in 1876. After several changes of owner, the same article says, the business took the name Haag-Streit in 1925.

The eye became its main subject in the 1930s. In a 2022 interview with Contact Lens Spectrum, the head of Haag-Streit USA said the two founders had worked with the University of Bern from the start, that the turn to eye care was led by Wilhelm Haag, “hence the name,” and that the company built its first slit lamp in 1933. The company’s own timeline marks the same year.

The Goldmann years.

The partner who defined Haag-Streit’s instruments was an ophthalmologist. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland records that Hans Goldmann led the Bern university eye clinic from 1935 to 1968 and, working with Haag-Streit, developed numerous new examination instruments that came into use worldwide. The same entry says he wrote about 200 articles in specialist journals and made fundamental contributions to the understanding of glaucoma and of glassblower’s cataract, work for which he was honoured several times. German Wikipedia, citing that entry, says the firm’s ophthalmic devices were developed with specialists at the Inselspital, Bern’s university hospital.

The company’s timeline lists what came of the partnership. The 1933 slit lamp was the first instrument it developed with Goldmann. In 1945 it introduced what it calls the world’s first manual perimeter, for mapping the visual field; in 1952 an adaptometer; in 1957 the applanation tonometer, used to measure the pressure inside the eye; and in 1963 what it describes as the first ceiling-mounted surgical microscope, controlled by foot from a special chair. In 1974, it says, Goldmann’s former assistant Franz Fankhauser developed the first automated static perimeter, the start of the Octopus line, which the 2022 Contact Lens Spectrum interview also named.

Later products moved from optics into software and simulation. The company dates its first virtual-reality surgical training simulator to 2001, its EyeSuite software and the Lenstar 900 biometer to 2008, and the Lenstar Myopia system to 2020 and 2021. In 2020 Haag-Streit bought 76.9% of VRmagic of Mannheim, a maker of training simulators, and the rest in November 2021, according to Metall Zug; the business is now Haag-Streit Simulation. The Eyestar 900 biometer gained an anterior-chamber module in 2022, and in 2024 the company added a second camera to its slit-lamp imaging module and launched a simulator for screening premature babies’ eyes.

Instruments, clinics and congresses.

Ophthalmic device makers sell to a narrow, expert audience: ophthalmologists, optometrists, opticians and hospital buyers. Their brochures and websites tend to follow a shared visual grammar. The instrument itself is usually the hero, photographed on a plain white or pale grey ground so that every knob, lens and joystick reads clearly, with the maker’s name small on the housing.

A second register places the same equipment in use. Slit lamps, fundus cameras and refraction units appear in clinic rooms, with a practitioner on one side of the chin rest and a patient on the other; surgical microscopes and laser systems are shown in operating theatres, with a surgeon at the console. Screens matter as much as hardware in this category, so many images show scans, maps or software views alongside the machine.

The third register is explanatory. Cross-section diagrams of the eye, showing the cornea, lens and retina, are used to explain what a device measures or treats, and many makers publish training material and webinars for clinicians. Because these are regulated medical products, some product pages note that a model is available only in certain markets.

Much of the category’s public life happens at congresses. Makers launch and demonstrate equipment on exhibition stands at meetings such as the ESCRS congress in Europe and the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, as well as at optical trade fairs, and their news pages often follow that calendar. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it now and where it says its products are made.

A family firm inside a Zug holding.

Haag-Streit grew abroad from the 1960s. German Wikipedia says it founded its first foreign subsidiary, in New Jersey, in 1965 and bought the Swiss precision-optics maker Spectros in the early 1970s; the Contact Lens Spectrum interview adds that it acquired the American examination-chair maker Reliance Medical Products in the 1980s.

The family sold control in 2018. Metall Zug, the industrial holding company based in Zug, agreed to buy 70% of Haag-Streit Holding, according to a transaction note from its adviser Lincoln International, and Metall Zug says the purchase took effect on 1 March 2018. The remaining 30% stayed with family shareholders, the Haag brothers, with Christoph Haag representing them on the board. Haag-Streit became Metall Zug’s Medical Devices business unit, and in December 2022 that unit sold Clement Clarke International, a British maker of inhalation devices, to focus on ophthalmology, Metall Zug says. German Wikipedia notes that Haag-Streit kept its own brand and market presence inside the group.

Today the head office is in Köniz, just outside Bern. The company says its group includes production and sales companies in Switzerland, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States and Shanghai; its careers pages name sites in Köniz, Ettingen and Aesch, Mannheim, Wedel, Saalfeld, Bishop’s Stortford and Mason. Its ranges run from slit lamps, tonometers and refraction units to biometers, perimeters, surgical microscopes and examination furniture, with DOMS and Reliance as named product brands.

For a design guide, Haag-Streit shows how a maker’s name can become attached to a clinical technique through one long partnership. Compare Zeiss, another European optical house, and Keeler, a British ophthalmic instrument maker. For this guide we use a slate blue, a graphite and a signal red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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