KARL MAYER Brand Guidelines: The Obertshausen Warp Knitting Machine Builder

Turned parts first, warp knitting after.

KARL MAYER writes its name in capitals, and it began with turned parts rather than textiles. Karl Mayer founded the business in 1937 in Obertshausen, a town near Offenbach in Hesse, as a mechanical workshop making turned parts, Textile World Asia reported in its 2012 note on the company’s 75th anniversary. German Wikipedia gives the same year and place.

The move into textile machinery came after the war, and the sources give two dates that describe different steps. In a statement from 1960, quoted by Knitting Industry in 2012, the founder said production of warp knitting machines started in 1947. The company’s anniversary text of 2022, reported by Knitting Industry and TextileTechnology, says the first machine was delivered in 1948. Warp knitting forms fabric from yarns fed lengthwise from beams, rather than across the width as in weft knitting, and it became the field the company is known for. German Wikipedia says warp preparation machinery for knitting mills was added in 1950.

In the same 1960 statement, marking the 5,000th machine, Karl Mayer said the company employed 1,200 people and had reached a capacity of 140 to 150 machines a month. Its first foreign subsidiary opened in Clifton, New Jersey, in 1956, followed by an early presence in Japan in 1968 and a subsidiary in China in 1995, according to the 2022 anniversary text. The company’s 100,000th machine was completed in 2010.

The family remained in the business. In 2012 Textile World Asia still described a family-run company with Fritz P. Mayer as managing director. In 2020 the group called itself “an independent family business.” By its 2022 anniversary, its own wording had shifted to “what was once a family business” that had developed into an international group; the Mayer family’s guidelines, it added, were still followed.

Warp knitting, warp preparation, technical textiles.

Its product range sorts into three fields, and its current website is organised the same way. Warp knitting covers tricot, raschel, lace and double raschel machines for underwear and clothing fabrics, curtains, terry and plush, German Wikipedia says. Warp preparation covers the machines that get yarn ready for the loom, including sizing machines, sectional warpers and denim dyeing lines. Technical textiles covers machines for high-strength fabrics and open grids, including weft-insertion machines used in reinforcing composites.

Much of that breadth was bought. German Wikipedia records that warp preparation for weaving started in 1991, and that in 2008 the company took over the weaving preparation division of Benninger of Uzwil, Switzerland, a business later moved to nearby Oberbüren. In 2014 it took over LIBA Maschinenfabrik of Naila, in Bavaria, another warp knitting and warping machine builder, with some 350 employees. Its technical textiles arm is based in Chemnitz, in Saxony, with a second site at Selbitz, according to the company’s list of locations.

That list shows how far the group has spread. Alongside the Obertshausen headquarters it names sites in Chemnitz and Selbitz in Germany, Mezzolombardo in Italy, Oberbüren in Switzerland, Bursa in Türkiye, Changzhou and Hong Kong in China, Greensboro in North Carolina, Fukui in Japan, and Surat in India. The Japanese company trades as Nippon Mayer, and the American one as Mayer Textile Machine Corp. The company says its aim is to produce in its main markets, and Knitting Industry reported in 2012 that its machines were being made in European and Chinese factories. Its 2022 anniversary text counted 3,100 employees from more than 20 nations.

The group also added software and new sectors. KM.ON, a software start-up set up in 2017, was built to move digital products along faster, and a Beyond Textile business unit followed in 2021, aimed at growth outside its traditional fields. Those moves show on its website today, where software such as KAMCOS 2, Camera ICS and K.ey sits under Advanced Solutions next to the machines.

New machines still lean into technical uses. On 5 November 2026 Knitting Industry reported that the company would show the Multiply BX, a biaxial warp knitting machine for reinforcement textiles in wind turbine rotor blades, at its Changzhou plant during ITMA Asia 2026 in Shanghai.

How textile machinery presents itself.

Textile machinery is sold through scale. A spinning frame can run the length of a mill hall, so makers often photograph it from one end, with spindles and yarn packages receding in a long line. Looms are shown mid-beat, with the rapier or the reed caught in motion. The pictures are less about a single object than about a repeated one, thousands of identical parts working in rows.

The opposite view is the close-up. Catalogues and websites in this trade move in tightly on needles, yarn guides, rings and travellers, because the product’s precision is hard to see from across a hall. Cones of coloured yarn supply the colour that grey and white machine casings lack, and flat-knitted sample panels show what a machine’s pattern work can do. 3D-knitted shoes and technical fabrics do the same for newer markets.

Software has joined the picture. Control touchscreens, status lights and mill-monitoring dashboards now appear next to the steel, as makers present automation and digital services alongside the machine. Saurer, for one, promotes LED operator guidance on its Autocoro 11 rotor machine.

The trade meets at its fairs, and these set much of the calendar for launches and imagery. ITMA, ITMA Asia, Techtextil and ShanghaiTex are the names that recur in these companies’ news pages, and a stand there works much as a catalogue does, with working machines, sample walls and yarn displays. Few makers in this guide publish a brand rulebook. Their identities show up instead in a company name carried over many decades, in product family names, and in how they picture the machine.

Five years with Stoll, and a return to the core.

The biggest brand decision of the group’s recent history lasted just over five years. In early 2020 KARL MAYER agreed to buy H. Stoll AG & Co. KG of Reutlingen, the flat knitting machine maker that Heinrich Stoll founded in 1873, in what Knitting Industry reported was an asset deal; TextileTechnology said on 2 March 2020 that the Stoll brand would continue unchanged within the group. The business transferred on 1 July 2020. The partnership reached the company name: from 12 August 2020, Textile World reported, Karl Mayer Textilmaschinenfabrik GmbH became KARL MAYER STOLL Textilmaschinenfabrik GmbH. In its 2022 anniversary text, the group presented KARL MAYER, Stoll and KM.ON as brands under one roof.

It did not hold. In early 2025 the company said it would go back to warp knitting, warp preparation and technical textiles, and discontinue flat knitting. It was unable to find an investor to continue production in Reutlingen, a site with 280 employees, textile network reported on 21 October 2025. The Reutlingen plant closed at the end of that month, and production in China was due to end in December. On 17 June 2026 Knitting Industry reported an agreement to transfer selected former Stoll assets, including the Stoll brand, to Ningbo Cixing, with closing still pending at that date and service for the installed machines planned to move to Cixing later in the year. The headquarters entry on the company’s list of locations now reads KARL MAYER Textilmaschinen GmbH.

Leadership changed in the same period. Arno Gärtner was chief executive at the 2022 anniversary. Uwe Lüders, long-time chairman of the supervisory board, later served as interim chief executive, and Lutz Wolf, who came from the Neuenhauser Group, became sole chief executive and chairman of the management board of KARL MAYER Holding SE & Co. KG on 1 November 2025, Textile World reported.

Its clearest design credit belongs to a screen rather than a machine. KAMCOS 2, the touchscreen user interface first shown at ITMA 2015, won an iF Design Award in 2016 in the Communication, Apps and Software section, the Indian Textile Journal reported from the company’s release. The 2022 anniversary ran under the motto “growing together.”

For a design guide, KARL MAYER shows how an industrial name can absorb a famous brand and then let it go while its own capitals stay fixed. Compare Stoll, the flat knitting name it bought and later wound down, and Groz-Beckert, a German maker of knitting needles. For this guide we use a teal and a steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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