MAFELL Brand Guidelines: The Oberndorf Carpentry-Machine Maker Behind the Erika Saw

A name cut from two words.

MAFELL takes its name from its first address: MAschinenfabrik FELLbach, the machine factory set up in 1899 at Fellbach, near Stuttgart. The company’s history page sets out the capitals that way, and the contraction has stayed on the machines long after the move. MAFELL left Fellbach in 1933 and is now based at Oberndorf am Neckar in Baden-Württemberg.

The date it is known for is 1926. The company calls what it built that year the world’s first portable carpentry machine. German Wikipedia describes it as a chain mortiser, the “Maschine Type A,” and the joinery magazine dds gave the same account in 2008, naming the Type A chain mortiser as the first portable machine for carpenters.

The 1933 move took the business to Aistaig, part of Oberndorf. In 1935, the company says, it was taken over by Rudolf Mey, a professional engineer. A second move, in 1990, brought it to its present site at Oberndorf-Lindenhof, and German Wikipedia says the firm became a stock corporation, Mafell AG, in 1997.

Ownership has been unusually steady. A 2021 portrait from the TOP 100 innovation competition says the company has been family-owned since 1935, and dds described it in 2016 as a family-held stock corporation with only its third head in 80 years. German Wikipedia says Ernst Krauss led the company from 1974 and his son Matthias Krauss from 2001. The TOP 100 portrait still named Matthias Krauss as chairman of the management board in 2021; by December 2025 a company press release gave that title to Thorsten Bühl.

The saw that became a generic term.

The product that defines MAFELL for many carpenters is the Erika, launched in 1980. The company calls it the world’s first pull-push saw. It is a mobile saw for site and workshop in which the blade moves through the work, rather than the work being fed past the blade. BM, the German joinery magazine, said in 2010 that the Erika was the first of its type worldwide and that its name had become a generic term for pull saws of this kind. German Wikipedia says the name is used that way in some languages.

BM reported in 1999 that the design had stood alone on the market for almost 13 years and that more than 100,000 had been built by then; German Wikipedia gives twelve years, and adds that the saw was long sold only in a typical green. BM’s 2010 report credits glass-fibre-reinforced plastic and magnesium die casting for keeping the weight down, and named Erika models 70 Ec and 85 Ec with fold-out legs.

Magnesium has its own place in the company’s timeline, which lists die castings from 1960. MAFELL’s market was carpenters first. Ernst Krauss told BM in 1999 that the firm, a traditional maker of carpentry machines, had also made power tools for joiners and cabinetmakers since 1952.

Later entries in the company’s timeline show how far that range has run: the DD40 in 2001, the DSS 300 cc insulation saw in 2017, the HIT-M zero-joint edge bander in 2019 and the NFU 50 groove cutter in 2020. dds listed the CUprex motors as a 2006 introduction.

Recognition has come mainly from innovation programmes. German Wikipedia says the PSS 3100 automatic panel-saw system won the Baden-Württemberg innovation prize, the Rudolf-Eberle-Preis, in 2002, and that the Flexistem KSP 40 won the eumacop innovation prize in 2003. MAFELL lists an iF Product Design Award in 2011 for the P1 cc jigsaw, and its certificates page lists TOP 100 awards for 2007, 2009, 2014 and 2021.

German Wikipedia, citing the Stuttgarter Zeitung of December 2024, says more than 50 MAFELL planing machines were put to work on the carpentry for the rebuilding of Notre-Dame de Paris from early summer 2023.

Machines for wood.

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.

Made at Oberndorf, the company says.

MAFELL’s manufacturing claim is specific. The company says it produces only at Oberndorf am Neckar, with up to 85 per cent of the work done in-house, from injection-moulded parts to motors, and calls this “Quality made in Germany.” The 85 per cent figure was already in print in dds in 2008, and in 1999 Ernst Krauss told BM the firm did practically everything itself, from turning and gear-making to motor building and surface finishing. In the same report BM described a new 1,800 square metre hall that had enlarged the production area by 40 per cent. A December 2025 press release gave the workforce as 360.

Since December 2025 the group has had a second site. As of 2 December 2025, MAFELL took over FRIEDRICH DUSS Maschinenfabrik of Neubulach, a family firm founded in 1920 that makes drilling, chiselling and diamond-drilling tools, as the company announced and BM reported on 12 December. It says DUSS continues at Neubulach with all its central functions, under Carsten Marschall as managing director. The press release calls both family companies from the Black Forest.

The brand’s voice is plain. Its slogan is “creating excellence,” and its philosophy page speaks directly to the tradesperson, saying the aim is that you should no longer have to think about your tool at work. The TOP 100 portrait reported that products were sold through dealers rather than directly, so that a carpenter could handle the machine in a shop, and BM had said the same in 1999. The portrait also names MAFELL as a founding member of the Cordless Alliance System, a shared battery platform across brands.

For a design guide, MAFELL shows how one product name can carry a company’s reputation for decades. Compare HOMAG and Weinig, two other German makers of woodworking machinery. For this guide we use a workshop green and a magnesium grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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