HOMAG Brand Guidelines: A Schopfloch Smithy, the 1962 Edgebander & Dürr

A workshop in Schopfloch and an engineer’s planning office.

HOMAG’s own history starts before the company does. It says that in 1948 Eugen Hornberger took over the blacksmith’s workshop of his father-in-law, Jakob Kilgus, in Schopfloch, the village in the Freudenstadt district that is still its headquarters. In 1956 Gerhard Schuler opened an engineering office for business organisation and planning, a firm that continues today as SCHULER Consulting in Pfalzgrafenweiler.

The two men came together on 1 January 1960, when, German Wikipedia says, they founded Hornberger Maschinenbaugesellschaft OHG; the company’s timeline writes the name as Hornberger Maschinenbau oHG. German Wikipedia says the firm became HOMAG Maschinenbau AG in 1987 and HOMAG Group AG in 2004.

The product that made its name came quickly. HOMAG dates to 1962 the development of an edgebanding machine using a hot-cold process, which it calls the world’s first and German Wikipedia describes as the first of its kind at the time. The same year, the company says, brought the first construction phase in Schopfloch and a first international appearance at the Hanover Fair, the event known as LIGNA since 1975. A double-sided edgebander followed in 1965.

Electronics came next. HOMAG says it developed one of the first CNC-controlled machines in 1974 and its own electronic machine control a year later, and it dates its woodWOP programming system to 1992. It describes woodWOP as a workpiece-oriented approach to CNC programming.

Six names, then one.

For decades HOMAG grew by buying specialists and keeping their names. The company’s timeline lists Brandt for edgebanders in 1976, Weeke for drilling in 1986, Holzma for panel saws in 1987 and Ligmatech for automation and packaging in 1990. Timber construction came with Weinmann in 1998, sanding with Bütfering in 2002, and profiling and finger-jointing with Torwegge in 2003. Sources differ on two dates: German Wikipedia puts Friz in 1976 and Bargstedt in 1995, while the company’s timeline gives 1980 and 1985.

The result was a family of badges. Reporting on a trade show in May 2005, the Timber Trades Journal named Brandt, Bütfering, Holzma, Homag, Ligmatech, Schuler and Weeke on one group stand, with machines from several of them linked to show a “modern production scenario.”

That arrangement ended in 2017. HOMAG’s history calls the move “One company – one brand”: a global strategy that put all products under the HOMAG name. Woodshop News reported on 13 April 2017 that six brands, namely Brandt, Bütfering, Friz, Holzma, Homag Automation and Weeke, would come together under it, and quoted the North American distributor Stiles Machinery saying the move combined the development teams. The Höchsmann woodworking machinery lexicon sums up the change: the saw once sold as Holzma, the edgebander as Brandt and the machining centre as Weeke would all carry the HOMAG logo.

A few names survive. The group still presents WEINMANN under its own name for timber construction, alongside SYSTEM TM for solid wood machinery and KALLESOE for high-frequency presses, the last two added through majority purchases in 2020 and 2021.

The brand now extends into software. HOMAG lists tapio, a digital platform set up in 2017, and HOMAG INTELLIGENCE, a cloud-based platform launched in 2025 to connect furniture sales, configuration and production. It says its 2021 majority stake in the Austrian software company Roomle accelerates digitalisation in the furniture industry. On the machine side, the company’s 2025 milestone is digital edge printing on the EDGETEQ P-200.

The workshop on show.

Woodworking machinery is sold on the look of the work as much as the look of the machine. A nesting CNC table loaded with a sheet of birch ply, the parts of a cabinet marked out across it, is one of the category’s standard pictures. So is an edge bander with panels feeding through in a line, each one leaving with a finished edge.

The colour of the machine often does a lot of the recognition work. Sliding table saws and planers tend to appear in a maker’s machine green or grey, photographed square-on against pale timber, with curls of shavings gathered under a planer as the proof that it has been running. Hand-held tools get a closer view: a plunge saw on a rail, its dust port in frame.

The setting changes with the customer. Factory shots show long lines and automated handling for furniture producers, while other pictures move to a joinery workshop with a bench, a stack of boards and a single operator. Many makers use both, because their ranges run from the small shop to the industrial plant.

Trade fairs are the category’s shop window. LIGNA in Hanover, Xylexpo in Italy, IWF in Atlanta and Holz-Handwerk in Nuremberg are where new machines are shown running, often linked together on a stand to suggest a working production line rather than a row of separate products. For a sector that sells to engineers and cabinetmakers alike, the running demonstration matters as much as the brochure. This guide looks at what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its machines are made.

Listed in 2007, part of Dürr since 2014.

HOMAG Group AG went public on 13 July 2007 and joined the SDAX that October, German Wikipedia says. Seven years later it acquired a parent. On 15 July 2014 Dürr announced agreements with major shareholders for 53.7 percent of the shares; EUWID described the buyer that month as a machine engineer from Bietigheim-Bissingen working predominantly for the car industry, and reported that Deutsche Beteiligungs AG wanted to give up all its shares. HOMAG said the purchase took effect on 10 October 2014, with a further 2.1 percent coming through a public offer. Through a shareholder pool with the Schuler family and the Klessmann Foundation, Dürr held 77.9 percent of the votes for resolutions on a planned domination agreement. German Wikipedia says that agreement was concluded in March 2015.

The shares still trade, now in the Basic Board segment. German Wikipedia, citing the company, gave the holdings at 10 November 2025 as 86 percent Dürr, 12 percent the founding families and 2 percent free float. Also in 2014, HOMAG bought all of Stiles Machinery, its long-standing US sales partner.

HOMAG describes itself as the world’s leading provider of integrated solutions for woodworking production, and says it has around 6,500 employees and an estimated global market share above 30 percent. It has described a network of 14 specialised production sites. Its German locations include Schopfloch, Holzbronn for panel saws, Herzebrock for drilling, Lemgo for edge technology, and Lichtenberg and Hemmoor for automation, with WEINMANN at St. Johann. Abroad, its history records production sites founded in Shanghai in 1994, Środa in Poland in 2004 and Bangalore in 2011; it said in 2021 that it would build a new plant at Środa.

Demand has swung. In November 2023 the company announced a package that included cutting nearly 600 jobs, citing a sharp cyclical fall in demand for woodworking machinery. It has also kept building at home. Furniture & Joinery Production reported in July 2025 that ground had been broken in Schopfloch on a new customer centre. HOMAG said the building, the HOMAG Experience Center, would include a “brand world” on its history, with completion planned for the end of 2026.

For a design guide, HOMAG shows what happens when a group retires a family of respected machine names and keeps one. Compare Weinig, another German woodworking machinery name, and Biesse, the Pesaro group that also reorganised its brands. For this guide we use panel blue, birch and grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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