Stoll Brand Guidelines: Reutlingen’s 1873 Flat-Knitting Name, Closed in 2025

A workshop in a former mill.

Stoll began in 1873, and not in the town that later carried its name around the world. The Stuttgarter Zeitung, in May 2025, placed the start in Riedlingen on the Danube, in a former mill used as a “mechanical workshop” for knitting machines. German Wikipedia names two men, Heinrich Stoll and Christian Schmidt; its company article says they founded the workshop, and its biography of Stoll says they took it over. The trade title Knitting Industry gives the shorter version, that Heinrich Stoll founded the company in Reutlingen in 1873.

The partners soon went separate ways. When the town refused permission to expand, the Stuttgarter Zeitung says, Stoll moved to Reutlingen in 1878; German Wikipedia’s biography dates the split itself to 1876. Schmidt’s side of the business moved to Neckarsulm in 1880, turned to bicycles from 1886 and stopped making knitting machines in 1892, German Wikipedia says. That company became NSU, and the Stuttgart paper traces the Volkswagen group’s Audi works at Neckarsulm back to it. One Swabian workshop therefore led to both a knitting-machine maker and a motorcycle name.

The invention most often linked to Stoll came in Reutlingen. A Swiss patent for a flat knitting machine for “links-links” goods, the German term for purl fabric, was filed on 30 October 1891 by the Reutlinger Strickmaschinenfabrik H. Stoll & Cie and published in June 1892, German Wikipedia records, and the machine was shown at the Chicago world’s fair of 1893. Knitting Industry, repeating the company’s account in 2011, dated Heinrich Stoll’s first purl flat knitting machine to 1892. The street of the Reutlingen headquarters was named after him.

From hand machines to the CMS.

Stoll liked to show its own history at trade fairs. In 2011, at Shanghaitex and then ITMA in Barcelona, it took the motto “our history – your future,” and Knitting Industry described stands running in order from an IBO hand flat machine to an AJUM of 1936 and a CMS 330.6. The stand also carried what the magazine called a rare museum piece, a LAMB model built in Reutlingen in 1905, and at Barcelona a 79-foot “History Carpet” across the floor.

The same period is the best documented for the family firm. The Turkish trade title Textotex wrote in January 2012 that the company was still run by the Stoll family, employed about 1,000 people worldwide and had a long record of patents. It credited Stoll with a jacquard selection device, a computer-controlled flat knitting machine and a pattern preparation system, and said it set up Stoll electronic GmbH in 1979 to make its own electronic components. Subsidiaries ran through the United States, France, Italy, Japan, China and India. Heinz-Peter Stoll left operational management on 31 January 2014 for the advisory board, Knitting Industry reported, and Andreas Schellhammer became chief executive. In 2018 the developer TRIAS bought the Stoll site in Reutlingen, the city says, to turn it into a commercial quarter.

Two names stood out in the later range. Knitting Industry in May 2025 described ADF as the flagship high-tech line and CMS as the entry-level and high-productivity machines. The company’s Fashion & Technology Centers in Reutlingen and Shanghai made knitted collections to show what those machines could do, and these went down the catwalk on its fair stands. Uses went well beyond sweaters: a 2026 release from the law firm ADVANT Beiten lists car seat covers and uppers for sports shoes. The same release, like Knitting Industry a year earlier, puts the number of modern Stoll machines in use worldwide at around 130,000. The Stuttgarter Zeitung gave the export share as about 90 percent.

Design and documentation.

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 plant closed, a brand transferred.

Stoll’s independence ended in 2020. Karl Mayer, the warp-knitting machine maker of Obertshausen, signed a contract on 26 February 2020 and said Stoll would join the group on 1 July 2020, Knitting Industry reported; the Stuttgarter Zeitung adds that a Chinese group had held a stake for a time before that, without naming it. Karl Mayer said the brand would be “continued unchanged,” and on 12 August 2020 its textile machinery company took the name Karl Mayer Stoll Textilmaschinenfabrik, TextileTechnology reported.

The arrangement lasted five years. In January 2025 Karl Mayer said it would return to warp knitting, warp preparation and technical textiles and leave flat knitting. Knitting Industry reported sustained losses, and the Stuttgarter Zeitung reported Karl Mayer’s view that cheaper Chinese competition weighed especially on Stoll. In October 2025 Oliver Mathews, president of the business unit, said no investor had been found to keep production going in Reutlingen, with its 280 employees. The plant closed on 31 October 2025, and production in China was due to end that December.

What remained was sold apart from the factory. In June 2026 Karl Mayer agreed to transfer selected assets to Ningbo Cixing, the Chinese flat-knitting machine maker that bought the Swiss brand Steiger in 2010, including the Stoll brand, selected materials and stock and certain technology. Knitting Industry reported on 17 June that closing was still pending and that future use of the assets was Cixing’s responsibility alone; Textotex wrote on 13 August 2026 that the transaction had not yet been completed. Cixing’s lawyers said the aim was to revive business in Europe and China. Stoll’s own website now says its spare-parts service, helpline and domain are being transferred from Karl Mayer to Cixing. Stoll is therefore a former machine builder whose name is changing hands, not a working Reutlingen factory. The name also belongs to a German front-loader maker, a different business.

For a design guide, Stoll shows how a brand can be sold on as an asset after its factory has closed. Compare KARL MAYER, its owner from 2020, and Shima Seiki, the Japanese flat-knitting maker Knitting Industry calls its long-time rival. For this guide we use a steel blue, a cream and a yarn red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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