Netstal Brand Guidelines: The 1857 Glarus Foundry That Built Its Logo Into a Factory

A village name, an iron and brass works, and a turn to plastics.

Netstal takes its name from a village rather than a person. The business began in 1857 in Netstal, in the Swiss canton of Glarus, as the Maschinenfabrik, Eisen- & Messinggiesserei Ulrich Rietmann & Cie, a machine works with an iron and brass foundry, the company says. German Wikipedia names Ulrich Rietmann as its founder and says locals called the factory the “Giessi,” the foundry. In 1922 it became Maschinenfabrik & Giesserei Netstal AG. The Swiss architecture database Architekturbibliothek gives a different origin, describing the firm as founded as a foundry in 1916.

Casting metal was only the start. German Wikipedia says the works went on to make pasta and laundry machines and electrical parts for telephones, and that the presses it built laid the ground for its later business. Citing the newspaper Südostschweiz, it adds that the company had 60 employees in 1936, when it was sold to Emilio Coppetti.

The change of direction came at the end of the Second World War. Netstal says it sold its first injection moulding machine in 1945; German Wikipedia describes that first machine as semi-automatic.

Demand then outgrew the village. Architekturbibliothek says expansion in the centre of Netstal was not possible, so in the 1950s the company chose a 50,000-square-metre plot in neighbouring Näfels. The sources date the move slightly differently: Netstal says it moved into the plant in 1961, German Wikipedia says 1962, and Architekturbibliothek dates the first two halls to between 1960 and 1965. In 1976 the company took the name Netstal-Maschinen AG, keeping the village in the title after leaving it.

From process control to preforms, discs and closures.

Netstal’s own timeline reads as a run of machine series. In 1973 it showed the first Neomat, which it says was the first injection moulding machine with the Sycap process control unit. Its first PET system followed in 1981, and the first PET-Line, with top entry, in 1999.

For a time, music and software were part of the story. In 1996 the company rolled out the DiscJet, a special machine for optical data carriers, and presented the Synergy series. Netstal says it held a 40% global share of CD systems in 2001, and swissinfo, reporting that October, named CD and DVD lines and PET bottle preforms among the uses of its machines.

The all-electric Elion arrived in 2003, and the Elios series was launched at K 2016 in Düsseldorf, the company says. The last Synergy left Näfels in 2017. In 2020 Netstal began the global roll-out of a PET-Line with side entry, a format that K-Zeitung reported in 2021 opened a new part of the preform market to the company.

Today’s website lists three main ranges. Elion covers clamping forces of 800 to 4,200 kN, with an electric clamping unit and an electric or hybrid injection unit. Elios runs from 4,500 to 10,000 kN. PET-Line comes in 3,000, 4,000 and 5,000 kN sizes, for tools of up to 192 cavities. Netstal names its fields as PET preforms, closures, thin-wall packaging, and medical and technical parts. According to German Wikipedia, the injection moulding offer extends to moulds, automation, temperature control units and material handling supplied as a system.

On where the machines are made, German Wikipedia gives Näfels as the head office and only production plant, with sales and service offices abroad in countries including the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, Thailand and China. It also says the machining work was sold to Bartholet Maschinenbau in 2014 and continues on the Näfels site as Linth Mechanik. Netstal’s chief executive Renzo Davatz spoke of “the highest Swiss quality” in the company’s 2023 brand statement.

Machines as the message.

Injection moulding machine makers sell equipment that most people never see, so their visual language is built for a trade audience. The machine itself is usually the hero: a long horizontal body photographed side-on in factory light, often in a paint scheme the maker has kept for years. A colour on the guarding can do the work of a logo across a crowded production hall.

The second recurring picture is the open machine. Platens stand apart with a mould half showing, and a robot arm reaches in to lift a part from the tool. Close-ups of screws and barrels show the plasticising end of the process, where granulate becomes melt, and walls of moulded samples turn an abstract capability into objects a visitor can pick up: closures, housings, gears and containers. Where makers serve cleanroom production, the same machines appear inside enclosed, brightly lit cells.

Trade fairs give makers a place to show a machine running: K in Düsseldorf, Fakuma in Friedrichshafen, NPE in the United States and Chinaplas in Asia. Live moulding demonstrations make parts in front of visitors.

Behind the machines sits a quieter layer of typography and naming. Series names, short codes and clamping forces in kilonewtons carry much of the information, and controllers have become design objects in their own right, with screens and panels of their own. Many makers remain family-held or sit within larger groups, so names and marks can outlast changes of ownership, and the history is often part of the pitch.

A diamond in the gables, and a name that went away and came back.

Netstal’s identity has an architectural form. The Näfels halls were designed by the Geneva architect Paul Waltenspühl with Heinz Brunner, and Architekturbibliothek says their glazed gable ends form a hexagon whose silhouette matches the company logo, an idea it traces back to Peter Behrens’s AEG turbine factory in Berlin.

Ownership moved around that fixed point. In 1992 Krauss-Maffei took over: Netstal says it acquired a majority, while German Wikipedia says 100% of the shares. By 2001 Netstal sat inside Mannesmann Plastics Machinery, then part of Siemens, and swissinfo reported that a sale to Christoph Blocher’s Emesta Holding had fallen through with Siemens’s planned sale of the group to Apax. German Wikipedia says the KraussMaffei group then passed through North American financial investors in 2002, 2006 and 2012, before ChemChina of China took it over in April 2016.

The name itself was the next casualty. In July 2019 K-Zeitung reported that all subsidiaries would trade as KraussMaffei, so the Swiss company became KraussMaffei High Performance AG, with Netstal surviving only as a product name on the machines. Two years later it reversed course: from 1 October 2021 the business returned to the Netstal name, which KraussMaffei’s chief executive said followed customers’ wishes, K-Zeitung reported.

In October 2023, just before the Fakuma fair, Netstal presented a new identity built on the values Leading, Reliable and Value-creating and the claim “Your best choice,” Petnology reported. The familiar diamond was kept but opened at the sides to frame the lettering. Machine covers became dark blue and white, with three-dimensional logos in a chrome-steel look and large windows onto the clamping units.

Krones of Germany said in January 2024 that it was close to buying all of Netstal from KraussMaffei, and completed the purchase on 28 March 2024. Krones says Netstal, with about 560 employees, keeps responsibility for its own business and sits in its filling and packaging segment, adding the injection moulding step to its PET lines.

For a design guide, Netstal shows how a mark can outlast a change of name when it is built into the factory and the machines. Compare Krones, its owner since 2024, and KraussMaffei, its parent for most of the three decades before that. For this guide we use dark blue, white and a chrome grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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