Picanol Brand Guidelines: The Ieper Loom Maker Named After a Spanish Inventor

A Flemish textile family and a Spanish design.

Picanol’s own short history starts in 1936, when, it says, the Belgian industrialist Charles Steverlynck set up Weefautomaten Picañol NV in Ieper, the West Flanders city also known as Ypres. An anniversary blog the group ran in 2011 and 2012 gives the date of incorporation as 22 September 1936 and calls the founder by his Flemish name, Karel, or “Mr Charles.” English Wikipedia, citing a 2011 volume of History of Technology, also gives 1936 and Steverlynck. The company’s head office still stands on a street named after him.

The Ieper site is older than the company. The same blog traces it to a foundry bought after the First World War and to Vansteenkiste Foundry and Workshops, incorporated in 1928, a maker of flax-scutching machinery built on the inventions of Constant Vansteenkiste. The Steverlynck family, already established in weaving and dyeing, took a board seat that year, with Baldewijn Steverlynck as chairman. By the group’s account the flax trade then fell into a long crisis, and Vansteenkiste went looking for new machines to build.

The answer came from Catalonia, and here the company’s accounts differ. Picanol’s milestones page, and the press release it issued in October 2023, say the first machine was based on a design by the Spanish engineer Jaime Picañol, after whom the company was named. The anniversary blog tells it in more detail and credits his brother: the Picañols ran a construction workshop in Sabadell, the elder son Juan drew an automatic loom in 1935, and the younger son Jaime was a designer of gears and gearboxes. The Spanish Civil War, it says, led the brothers to travel to Flanders looking for backers, and Karel Steverlynck patented the process together with Juan. Both accounts agree on the name: it honours the Spanish inventors’ family, though the blog adds that Karel Steverlynck kept the priority shareholding for himself.

The name then needed explaining. Until the early 1980s, the blog says, it was pronounced “Picanyol.” Partly because many people took it for a Spanish or South American firm, the tilde was removed in 1987, the year the company showed at ITMA in Paris under the line “Picanol Rules the Weaves.” Nor was Ieper an obvious home for a loom maker. The blog points out that the city’s cloth held a leading position in Europe around the 13th century, but that its roughly 2,000 looms had fallen to a dozen by 1700, and it calls the link “more of a coincidence.”

From the shuttle to air and rapier.

Picanol’s milestones read as a history of how a weft gets across a loom. The machine that made the name was the President, an automatic loom presented at ITMA in Lille in 1951; the company says more than 160,000 were sold. In 1963 it built an automatic foundry and a new assembly line outside the centre of Ieper. At ITMA in Paris in 1971 it showed the MDC, which it describes as the world’s first electronically controlled shuttle weaving machine.

The shuttle then began to disappear from its range. The PGW of 1975, shown at ITMA in Milan, was its first shuttleless machine and used rapier insertion, in which a gripper carries the weft yarn across. The PAT, presented at the ATME show in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1980, used an air jet instead. Those two technologies still define the company: it describes its business as high-tech weaving machines based on airjet and rapier technology. Its 1983 GTM rapier, shown with microprocessor control at ITMA in Milan, was followed in the early 1990s by the Delta and Omni airjets, and the Quick Style Change system, which the company says allows one person to change a style in under 30 minutes.

The modern names arrived from 2000: the OMNIplus airjet, the OptiMax rapier in 2007, the OmniPlus Summum in 2011 for the company’s 75th anniversary, and the OptiMax-i in 2015. At ITMA in Barcelona in 2019 it launched the OmniPlus-i. The 2021 “Connect” generation added PicConnect, an online platform for machine data and service. In October 2024 the Supermax rapier, which the company says is aimed specifically at Asian markets, made its debut at ITMA Asia + CITME in Shanghai.

The company counts its output in round numbers from Ieper: the 300,000th weaving machine in 2010, the 100,000th rapier machine in 2020, and the 400,000th in October 2023, an OmniPlus-i Connect airjet bound for a customer in India, as Textile World reported from the company’s release that month. Ieper is not the only site. Picanol started producing machinery in China in 1994 through a joint venture, Suzhou Picanol Textile Machinery, which it says it owned 60 percent, and its GT-Max machine went into production in Suzhou in 2008. The company now says it employs more than 1,200 people worldwide.

How textile machinery presents itself.

Textile machinery is sold through scale. A spinning frame can run the length of a mill hall, so makers often photograph it from one end, with spindles and yarn packages receding in a long line. Looms are shown mid-beat, with the rapier or the reed caught in motion. The pictures are less about a single object than about a repeated one, thousands of identical parts working in rows.

The opposite view is the close-up. Catalogues and websites in this trade move in tightly on needles, yarn guides, rings and travellers, because the product’s precision is hard to see from across a hall. Cones of coloured yarn supply the colour that grey and white machine casings lack, and flat-knitted sample panels show what a machine’s pattern work can do. 3D-knitted shoes and technical fabrics do the same for newer markets.

Software has joined the picture. Control touchscreens, status lights and mill-monitoring dashboards now appear next to the steel, as makers present automation and digital services alongside the machine. Saurer, for one, promotes LED operator guidance on its Autocoro 11 rotor machine.

The trade meets at its fairs, and these set much of the calendar for launches and imagery. ITMA, ITMA Asia, Techtextil and ShanghaiTex are the names that recur in these companies’ news pages, and a stand there works much as a catalogue does, with working machines, sample walls and yarn displays. Few makers in this guide publish a brand rulebook. Their identities show up instead in a company name carried over many decades, in product family names, and in how they picture the machine.

A loom maker inside a wider industrial group.

Picanol went on the Brussels Stock Exchange in 1966, and over the following decades grew beyond looms. English Wikipedia records that its foundry became a separate company, Proferro, in 1989, that it took a share in the electronics maker now called PsiControl, and that it bought Verbrugge in Belgium and Steel Heddle in the United States in 2001. Luc Tack arrived as majority shareholder in 2009, Dutch Wikipedia says, and the Flemish business weekly Trends named him Manager of the Year for 2014.

The move that reshaped the group came in 2013, when Picanol Group agreed to buy the French state holding SNPE’s stake in the chemicals company Tessenderlo and, Tessenderlo’s own history says, became its main shareholder. A merger of the two was announced in December 2015 and dropped in March 2016 after opposition from some shareholders, according to Dutch Wikipedia, citing Made in Limburg. On 8 July 2022 they tried again, and Picanol Group became a business unit of Tessenderlo Group with effect from January 2023. Picanol left the stock market in March 2023, Dutch Wikipedia says, citing Tessenderlo, leaving one listing, on Euronext Brussels under TESB. Tessenderlo’s history names Tack as chief executive on its executive committee from January 2024, and the group says it has more than 7,000 staff under the line “Every Molecule Counts.” The name now sits at three levels: Picanol the weaving machine maker, Picanol Group, and the Tessenderlo parent.

Two recent projects make the company’s design thinking visible. For the Ultimax rapier, launched at ITMA in Milan in June 2023, Picanol says the classic exterior of its machines was “radically disrupted” so that the outside would show how different the machine was inside. Its new headquarters in Ieper, opened in April 2025 in the presence of Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever, covers 20,000 square metres and, the company says, takes the shape of a weaving shuttle. On its website the OmniPlus-i Connect is sold in three words: “Smarter. Greener. Faster.” The company calls itself the world’s leading weaving machine manufacturer; that is its own description.

For a design guide, Picanol shows how a founder’s story, a dropped tilde and a building shaped like a shuttle can carry an industrial name more than the machines alone. Compare Itema, another maker of weaving machines, and KARL MAYER, a German machine builder that has also lived through ownership and portfolio change. For this guide we use a navy and a flax with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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