ILLIG Brand Guidelines: The Heilbronn Garage Repair Shop That Built Thermoforming Lines

A garage, a drill and a run of dryers.

ILLIG began as a repair shop. The company’s own history says Adolf Illig opened it on 27 May 1946 in the small garage at his parents’ house, and German Wikipedia gives the same beginning: a small repair workshop founded by him in 1946. Its base is Heilbronn, in Baden-Württemberg, and the first product of its own, the company says, arrived in 1948: a pillar drilling machine.

The next step came through contract work. From 1952 Illig built dryers for Passat Maschinenbau, which German Wikipedia describes as a Heilbronn firm and the machines as laundry dryers. Both the company and German Wikipedia say the experience from that work led to its first thermoforming machine, the UA 100 of 1956; the company says “UA” meant universal automatic machine. Thermoforming shapes heated plastic sheet in a mould.

In 1960 came the R 650, which the company calls “the first automatic vacuum thermoformer in the world to work from pre-printed roll stock,” made to produce decorated lids. German Wikipedia repeats that description, citing the company’s history page.

The headcount in the company’s timeline shows how quickly the business grew. It gives 160 staff at the move to new premises in Mauerstrasse in 1961, 480 in 1967, and more than 800 in 1968. Dryer production stopped in 1967 because, the company says, the space was urgently needed for thermoforming work. A second factory followed in 1969.

From cups and lids to complete lines.

The product that defines ILLIG’s catalogue is the RDM series, begun in 1963 with the RDM 37/6, an automatic pressure-forming machine that formed and punched parts. The following year the company set up a mould and tool shop so that it could supply complete thermoforming lines for cups and lids. In 1968, its timeline says, it built a first packaging line combining form, fill and seal functions, along with piston dosing machines for filling paste-like goods.

The range widened in the 1970s and after. From 1973 ILLIG made special machines for producing baths and sinks from PMMA, or acrylic glass. In 1993 it developed its first in-mould labelling line, sold as IML-T, for applying polypropylene labels to polypropylene margarine tubs. It dates its first coffee-capsule mould to 2001. In 2008 it presented the BF 70, which it describes as the first undercut thermoformer of its kind. In 2013 it introduced the “IC” machines, built around what it calls an Intelligent Control Concept, and a fourth generation followed in 2019 with the IC-RDM 76K.

Its overseas network grew in stages. ILLIG France, the first branch abroad, dates from 1976 by the company’s account and German Wikipedia’s. ILLIG UK took on sales and service in 1983, service centres for the Far East and the United States opened in 1996, and Latin America followed in 1997. ILLIG Japan took over sales and service in 2004, and ILLIG China opened near Shanghai in 2018 with a showroom. In 2019 ILLIG Romania, in Sibiu, opened as a further production site.

The later years brought more named programmes. Pactivity, from 2017, is its packaging-development service. In 2020 it launched I-PACK, a brand for plastic-and-cardboard combinations. In 2021, the year of its 75th anniversary and the “Next 75” motto, it introduced the RedLine and BlueLine segments and showed the RDF 85 at the Chinaplas fair in China.

How the category presents itself.

Machinery for plastics film, sheet and recycling is sold to plant owners and engineers, and its makers build their image on the machines themselves. The tallest of them is the blown-film tower, where a shining bubble of film rises several storeys before it is flattened and wound. Wide cast lines and winders offer the same kind of picture lying down: long, level and glossy, with the finished roll as the closing shot.

Close-ups supply the colour. Extruder barrels, guards and control cabinets are often finished in brand colours, which makes the livery of the line one of the few visual assets a maker fully owns. Thermoforming makers favour the end of the line, with formed trays stacking up as they leave the machine. Makers of bottles and preforms show rows of finished shapes.

Recycling has added its own set of pictures. Pellets in glass jars, shown before and after processing, turn an industrial step into something that can sit on a table at a trade stand. Bales of used film do the opposite job, showing the raw material as it arrives. Both images need careful handling, because they suggest a result that the words around them should state plainly and with a source.

The category’s main stages are its trade fairs, among them K in Düsseldorf, NPE in the United States, Plastpol in Poland and Fakuma in Germany. Stands there often feature running machinery. For a designer, this is a field where the identity has to work on a steel guard, a touch screen and a technical data sheet as well as on a web page. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker and leaves the rest out.

A new company under an old name.

The original company did not survive in its old legal form. Trade reports say a capital and restructuring process began at the end of 2023. On 9 April 2024 the local court agreed to an insolvency in self-administration for ILLIG Maschinenbau, German Wikipedia says, and t-online reported the next day that an IG Metall union official blamed customers’ reluctance to buy and the weak economy.

Management told staff on 12 July 2024 that around 200 jobs would go, Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing reported; German Wikipedia adds that the machining operation closed. On 17 July the company announced a purchase agreement with an unnamed German investor. Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing reported on 19 July that a company spokesman had confirmed the buyer was Orlando Capital, an investor based in Munich, according to Heidelberg24.

The deal took effect on 31 July and ownership passed on 1 August 2024, Petnology reported. A new company, ILLIG packaging solutions GmbH, took over the tasks of ILLIG Maschinenbau GmbH & Co. KG, keeping the brand and the product portfolio, with systems still assembled in Heilbronn and Sibiu.

The new company widened its materials. At the Fachpack fair in 2024 it showed a modular system for packaging made from dry natural fibres, its first offer in that segment. The company says the Dry Fiber technology has since received the German Packaging Award and, in November 2025, first place in its category at the Umwelttechnikpreis Baden-Württemberg. In April 2026 it announced two box-filling units, the BFU 300 and BFU 500, built on its own drive and control technology.

Its management has also changed. A release of February 2025 named Carsten Strenger, Matthias Holder and Thomas Schmidt as the leadership team; the website now says Christoph Gusenleitner, as CEO, and Oliver Steiner, as CFO, jointly manage the company. It describes five subsidiaries, customers in more than 80 countries, and production sites in Germany and Romania, and it speaks of 80 years in business, counting across the 2024 change of company.

For a design guide, ILLIG shows how a name in capitals can carry on when the legal company behind it is replaced. Compare Kiefel, another German thermoforming-machine maker, and MULTIVAC, a German packaging-machine name that also starts in a garage workshop. For this guide we use a red, a blue and graphite with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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