An inventor, a patent file and a pocket-sized umbrella.

Knirps is a German word for a small child or a “little fellow,” and since the 1930s it has also been the name of a folding umbrella small enough to go in a coat pocket. German Wikipedia, citing the Duden dictionary and a 2015 survey of brand names used as generic words, notes that in German “Knirps” is now widely used for any collapsible pocket umbrella. Knirps itself says the name came from Hans Haupt, the inventor, who called his umbrella a “kleines Kerlchen,” a little chap.

The best-documented account of Haupt’s work comes from the German Patent and Trademark Office (DPMA), which tells the story in its series of “inventions with a history.” The DPMA says little is known about Haupt. It relays that he is said to have been a retired mining official from Breslau, and that, according to the story, he walked with a stick because of a war injury and could not also carry an ordinary umbrella, so he designed one that would fit in a coat pocket.

The patent files show a long road. The DPMA lists a 1916 application by Haupt for a shortenable umbrella with a stick built in telescoping sections, and a 1919 application for a canopy that folded into a single double pleat. By 1925, it says, he had settled on the name Knirps and founded a company of that name, Knirps GmbH, in Berlin, which filed the next application. In 1928 he registered the Knirps trademark, which the DPMA says is still valid today.

The application now regarded as the birth of the Knirps came on 26 April 1930: a “verkürzbarer Schirm” (shortenable umbrella) filed by Knirps GmbH, centred on auxiliary struts that could slide freely on the frame. The DPMA says that patent was only granted on 23 November 1934. German Wikipedia cites another Haupt patent, for a slider lock, filed in 1927 and published in 1932, and dates the invention itself to 1928, the year Knirps also gives.

Bremshey, the shop window and the red dot.

Haupt needed a manufacturer. According to the DPMA, it was Fritz Bremshey, heir to the family firm of the same name in Solingen, who saw the potential of the small umbrella and put the first Knirps on the market in 1932. The first buyers it aimed at were women; Knirps’s own timeline marks the introduction of a Lady-Knirps that year. The DPMA says Bremshey met early scepticism with marketing that was new for the time, including live demonstrations of the umbrella in shop windows. German Wikipedia likewise credits Bremshey & Co. with building the brand through its marketing.

After the Second World War Haupt also patented his collapsible umbrella abroad, including in the United States, the DPMA notes, and the Knirps became known worldwide. Success brought imitators, and the market grew tighter for Bremshey. To set the Knirps apart, the DPMA says, the Solingen firm introduced the red dot as part of the brand logo in 1969. The palette in this guide starts from that red dot.

Bremshey kept developing the product. Knirps dates an umbrella that opens and closes automatically to 1965, and lists an extra-large “Jumbo-Knirps” in 1977 and patent applications for its automatic models in the 1990s. The DPMA mentions opening and closing automatics among Bremshey’s technical developments, along with a steady stream of new trademarks, among them a “Knirps Corona.”

Bremshey could not, in the end, withstand price pressure from cheap imports from the Far East, and the DPMA says the company went bankrupt at the beginning of the 1980s. German Wikipedia, citing Der Spiegel, says that after the collapse of Bremshey AG in Solingen the Knirps name was taken over in August 1982 by its Solingen competitor Kortenbach & Rauh, maker of Kobold umbrellas. It says production in Germany ended in 1999, and that in 2003 a licensing company, Knirps Licence Corporation, was founded in Solingen to license the brand internationally.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all umbrella names: James Smith & Sons, totes, Knirps, London Undercover, Il Marchesato, GustBuster and ShedRain. Umbrella brands sit at many different points in the trade, from a single London shop to names sold in department stores and supermarkets around the world, and from makers that still sew in their own workrooms to brands whose umbrellas are designed in one country and made in another.

An umbrella brand’s identity is usually carried by a handful of things — a name, a handle, a canopy colour or print, a label sewn into the cover — rather than by any one product, because the company behind the name may have changed hands or moved its production since it began. Some names are very old: James Smith & Sons, which English Wikipedia says was founded in 1830, still trades from a Grade II* listed shop on New Oxford Street in London. Others have moved country: the Knirps name, which German Wikipedia traces to Hans Haupt’s folding umbrella of 1928 in Solingen, is now run from Braunau am Inn in Austria.

That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its umbrellas 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 umbrellas are made and how its products and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A German name with an Austrian owner.

The brand moved to Austria in 2005. German Wikipedia says that in October 2005 the Austrian umbrella maker Doppler & Co. GmbH and the Swiss company Strotz AG acquired the brand; doppler’s own company history records the purchase of the Knirps brand that year “with the Swiss partner Strotz.” The DPMA puts it more briefly: after a roundabout route, the traditional brand ended up with an Austrian company in 2005. doppler says it was founded in 1946 as the umbrella factory of Ernst Doppler in Braunau am Inn, and that its group today combines the doppler and Knirps brands, with its headquarters and factory in Braunau.

Knirps GmbH, the company that owns the brand, is based in Braunau am Inn, according to the imprint of the Knirps website, and the site presents doppler and its “manufaktur” line as the other brands of the doppler Group. German Wikipedia describes Knirps GmbH as developing umbrellas and licensing the brand worldwide. The range has widened beyond the pocket umbrella: Knirps says it introduced its first rainwear in 2011, a foldable “Travel Wear” line and its first sunshades in 2012, and a redesigned T-Series of umbrellas in 2016, and doppler dates the launch of Knirps garden sun umbrellas to 2012. Knirps calls its X1 of 2004 the smallest Knirps ever.

The DPMA sums up the brand’s position today as a former market leader serving a small niche in a folding-umbrella business it describes as dominated by low-cost Asian products, adding that the company appears well settled in that niche.

For a design guide, Knirps shows how a single word and a single red dot can carry a product from a Berlin patent file of the 1920s, through a Solingen factory, to an Austrian umbrella group, while the name itself passes into everyday German. Compare doppler, the Braunau umbrella maker that has owned Knirps since 2005 with its Swiss partner Strotz, and EuroSCHIRM, another German umbrella brand. For this guide we use red dot, canopy black and frame steel with a compact sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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