From a calving aid sold door to door to a company on the same farmyard.

Kerbl is the trading name of Albert Kerbl GmbH, a German supplier of agricultural, equestrian and pet products based in Buchbach, in Upper Bavaria. The company’s own history page says Albert Kerbl founded the business in 1984 on his parents’ farm in Buchbach, and that the headquarters is still there. The same page credits a single product, a calf-delivery aid, as the idea that set the business going.

The fuller version of that story was told in the IHK-Magazin of the Munich and Upper Bavaria chamber of commerce, in a profile by Harriet Austen in its April 2025 issue. According to the magazine, Albert’s father, Isidor Kerbl, was a farmer who came across a device at a trade fair that made calving much easier. Albert, then 18 and training as a farmer, began selling this Geburtshelfer on the side, driving his father’s car from farm to farm, and told the magazine that he earned well from it. He then widened the range step by step into a small wholesale business for farm supplies, and when he formed the limited company in 1984 it stood, the magazine reported, on the grounds of the former family farm. A company news item published in 2025 under the title “From Bavaria to the world” likewise traces the business back to the 1960s and says Albert built it up together with his son.

The range has spread well beyond the cowshed. The IHK-Magazin lists the business areas as farming, horse and rider, pasture fencing, workwear and safety, hobby farming and pet supplies, the German Heimtier. On the company’s English-language site, the pet category is split into dog, cat and rodent supplies, sitting beside the stable and fencing ranges.

Partnerships in Poland, the Far East and Germany, and a few clear lines on where things are made.

The first big step outside Bavaria came in 1993. The company history says a partnership with the Polish firm CANEXPOL expanded its manufacturing expertise and marked the start of its international growth; the IHK-Magazin described the joint venture in Poland as the moment the wholesaler became a manufacturer. Albert recalled to the magazine that someone simply walked through the door offering to work together, and that the deal was agreed an hour later. A second Polish partnership followed in 2005, with LubaCell, which the company says broadened its expertise in batteries and energy supply for agriculture, and in 2006 it entered what it calls its first production partnership in the Far East.

Several of the later steps were about making things in Germany. In 2000 Kerbl acquired AKO-Agrartechnik of Wangen im Allgäu, which the company presents as pasture-fencing expertise “made in Germany.” In 2021 it established Aesculap Schermaschinen GmbH, a shearing-technology business it also describes with the words “made in Germany,” and in 2024 a partnership with the rope maker Seilerei Kösters strengthened, in the company’s words, its in-house production of fencing materials. The group page lists AKO, Aesculap Schermaschinen and Kösters among its German locations, with CANEXPOL, LubaCell and Kerbl East in Poland. Taken together, the history names three sources of manufacturing: production in Germany, partners in Poland and production partners in the Far East.

The goods all leave from Bavaria. Kerbl opened a logistics centre in Ampfing, near Buchbach, in 2009, expanded it in 2015, and says a second expansion in 2025 doubled its storage capacity and automated its warehouse processes.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are pet accessory names, five of them European and one American: Trixie, Karlie, Kerbl, Ferplast, Beeztees and Tuffy. Pet accessory brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to wholesalers that supply shops under several labels, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a village pet shop to a garden centre or a farm store.

A pet accessory brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single collar or toy than by a catalogue, a name and the packaging that hangs on a shop wall, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its warehouses or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually designed and made.

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

A wholesaler that chose to become a brand, still run by the founding family.

The name on the products is a relatively recent decision. Kerbl’s history lists 2010 as the year it was launched as a manufacturer’s brand, and Albert told the IHK-Magazin that the company wanted to be seen as a brand in its own right rather than as a wholesaler of other people’s goods. The same year, according to the magazine, his son Ulli Kerbl, who had trained as an industrial engineer and worked as a technical editor at a communications agency, joined as a product manager and first built up the farm-supplies division. He has been a managing director since 2015, alongside his father. The company describes itself as an independent family business, and the Kerbl family has run it since Albert founded it in 1984.

The international network grew alongside the brand. Kerbl set up Kerbl France in 1997 and Kerbl Austria in 2003, and established Kerbl East in Poland in 2014. In 2017 it integrated Bucas, the Irish equestrian-equipment company, a step the history says expanded its expertise in equipment for horses and riders, and in 2020 it integrated Rutland Electric Fencing and launched Kerbl UK. The group page lists Bucas among its locations in the United Kingdom and Ireland, alongside the Kerbl subsidiaries, with the head office in Buchbach. Its German locations run from the Buchbach head office and the Ampfing logistics centre to the fencing, shearing and rope businesses of AKO, Aesculap Schermaschinen and Kösters.

For a design guide, Kerbl shows how a farm-supply wholesaler can turn its own name into a manufacturer’s brand that stretches from fencing and stable equipment to dog, cat and rodent supplies, without leaving the farmyard where it began. Compare Trixie and Karlie, two other German pet-supply houses. For this guide we use barn red, pasture green and forest with a sturdy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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