Metrohm Brand Guidelines: Herisau 1943, the Titriskop & a Foundation as Owner

A workshop in an empty shop, in wartime.

Metrohm was founded in Herisau, in the Swiss canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden, in 1943. The company dates its start to 1 April 1943 and names Bertold Suhner, a mechanical engineer trained at ETH Zurich, as its founder; German Wikipedia and a 2021 profile by swissinfo.ch both name a second founder, his friend Willi Studer. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland notes that Suhner had earlier built up a high-frequency cable department in his father’s firm in Herisau.

The firm was born during the Second World War, in which Switzerland stayed neutral. swissinfo.ch, drawing on a talk Suhner gave for the company’s 25th anniversary, reported that the two men set up a workshop in an empty shop in Herisau and made radios and oscillographs, measuring equipment for high-frequency and telecommunications engineering. With the borders closed, such goods were hard to obtain in Switzerland, so the young company could sell during the war; but materials were scarce, radio dealers proved a weak market, and the business took on growing bank debts.

The end of the war brought cheaper radios imported from America, and losses, swissinfo.ch reported. Suhner turned instead to chemical measuring instruments for the industry around Basel. Metrohm made an electronic pH meter in 1947 and its first titrator, the Titriskop, in 1949. Studer disagreed with the change of course and left in 1947; he went on to found Studer Revox in Zurich, swissinfo.ch noted. The company’s own account adds that the partners also differed over Suhner’s refusal to take on further bank loans when debts ran well beyond the share capital that year.

From the Titriskop to a foundation.

The chemical turn paid off slowly. According to swissinfo.ch, an electrode and a piston burette for measuring liquid volumes helped lift the company out of debt in the 1950s, and in 1959 Metrohm first registered its Potentiograph titrator. The same report says Suhner wanted the products made in the region, which Metrohm still does. The company’s own history describes a deliberate preference for slow, organic growth and quotes Suhner: “My aim was always to keep the size of the company manageable, and create a solid base rather than just growing regardless of cost.” The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland says the firm, after an early struggle to survive, became the second most important company in Appenzell Ausserrhoden and a worldwide supplier of electronic measuring instruments for chemistry.

Ownership is the unusual part of the story. Suhner withdrew from running the business at the end of the 1960s, the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland says. In 1982 he and his two co-owners, Hans Winzeler and Lorenz Kuhn, placed their shares in the newly created Metrohm Foundation, which has owned all of Metrohm AG since then; the dictionary gives the aim as preventing a takeover by interests from outside the canton. swissinfo.ch reported that Adrian Déteindre took over as managing director from 1983. The company says the foundation invests its dividends in educational, cultural and community projects in eastern Switzerland, including a chair for new materials at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, and lists “maintaining our financial independence” in its mission.

Titration remains the company’s home ground; Metrohm describes itself as “the global market leader in analytical instruments for titration.” German Wikipedia lists titrators for potentiometric, thermometric and Karl Fischer titration, including the Omnis platform with automated sample handling, alongside instruments for ion chromatography, near-infrared and Raman spectroscopy, voltammetry and electrochemistry, and online process analysis. The company also names pH and conductivity measurement, oxidation-stability testing and liquid handling among its methods.

Benchtops, sample trays and trade fairs.

Laboratory instrument makers tend to present themselves through the laboratory itself. Their pictures are usually of benchtop instruments in bright white rooms: chromatographs, spectrometers and titrators lined up on long benches, with sample trays loaded and a screen beside each one showing a chromatogram’s peaks or the curve of a spectrum. The instrument is often shown with its door open or a vial in a gloved hand, so that the scale of the work is clear.

People appear in a familiar costume. Scientists in white coats, safety glasses and nitrile gloves lean over a pipette, check a result on a monitor or load a rack of samples, and the setting is usually a clean, well-lit room rather than a factory floor. Lab automation brings its own imagery: pipetting robots moving across a deck of microplates, grippers lifting a plate from one station to the next, and close-ups of tips, tubes and wells.

The same settings recur across the category: product photographs on plain white or pale grey backgrounds, cut-away diagrams of an instrument’s inner path, and data shown as it would appear on the screen — a set of peaks, a spectral curve, a titration curve or a grid of wells coloured by result. In this kind of picture the instrument, the sample and the data carry the message, and a maker’s name usually appears as a badge on the casing or a logo in the corner.

Trade fairs remain central to how the industry shows itself. Exhibitions such as analytica in Munich, Pittcon in the United States and ACHEMA in Frankfurt bring instrument makers together on large stands, where new instruments are launched and demonstrated. The guides that follow look at what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it and how its name has changed — and keep the company’s own claims separate from what independent sources record.

Made in Herisau, sold in more than 80 countries.

Metrohm says it is “still firmly rooted where it was founded,” and that most of its analytical instruments are engineered, designed, developed and produced in Herisau, where it aims to make as much as possible itself, from software and printed circuit boards to sensors, separation columns and accessories. German Wikipedia likewise says development and manufacture remain in Herisau. In 2011 the company moved from the centre of the town to the Hölzli industrial area, the article adds; the headquarters was extended in 2015 and the campus enlarged again in the summer of 2024.

Some lines come from elsewhere in the group. German Wikipedia lists production sites including Metroglas in Switzerland for electrochemical and optical sensors, Metrohm Process Analytics and Metrohm Autolab in the Netherlands, Metrohm DropSens in Spain and Metrohm Spectro in the United States. The company says Autolab is based in Utrecht and DropSens in Asturias, both making instruments for electrochemistry, and that Metrohm Spectro, in Plainsboro, New Jersey, engineers and produces its handheld and portable Raman analysers. Metrohm says it sells in more than 80 countries through more than 37 subsidiaries of its own and exclusive distributors; German Wikipedia counts around 3,200 employees in 2024, about 700 of them in Herisau, and new subsidiaries in Korea, Portugal and Ghana in 2025.

For a design guide, Metrohm shows how a mid-sized maker can build an identity on one town, one technique and an owner that cannot sell. Compare Mettler-Toledo, another Swiss laboratory-instrument maker, and Shimadzu. For this guide we use a deep teal, white and a cool grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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