Wanzl Brand Guidelines: The Leipheim Trolley Maker Whose Turnstiles Became axovend

A locksmith’s workshop, rebuilt after the war.

Wanzl’s story starts outside Germany. The Neue Deutsche Biographie, in a 2020 entry by the historian Richard Winkler, says a master locksmith named Oswald Wanzl opened a workshop in Giebau, in the Sternberg district of Moravia, in 1878, and that his son Rudolf Wanzl senior took it over in 1918 and built it into a business making scales and trading in farm machinery, with about 20 staff. The sources read for this guide do not describe the workshop during the war years of 1939 to 1945. The village is Jívová in today’s Czech Republic; the company’s own history describes the place as part of the Sudetenland.

After the Second World War and the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia, the Neue Deutsche Biographie says, the family settled in Leipheim, in Bavaria, in 1946. There Rudolf senior and his son Rudolf Wanzl junior — who had trained as a locksmith in the family workshop, qualified as a master mechanical engineer and come home from prisoner-of-war captivity — set up a workshop for scales and repairs with the brothers Josef and Franz Siegel, starting with three employees. The company dates its own new beginning to 1947, and German Wikipedia gives the same year.

The turn to retail came quickly. In 1948 the firm, then trading as Wanzl & Siegel, made baskets by hand for a self-service demonstration room at the Augsburg branch of the American cash-register maker National Cash Register, which was promoting self-service shopping, the Neue Deutsche Biographie says. At the end of 1949 it supplied trolleys and baskets for one of Germany’s first supermarkets, in Hamburg; the company says the Hamburg consumer co-operative “Produktion” ordered 40 trolleys and 100 baskets. In 1951, prompted by the American trolley of Sylvan Goldman, Wanzl applied for a patent on a trolley with a fixed basket and began series production in Leipheim. In 1954 the Siegel brothers left to start their own firm at Jettingen, and the business was renamed Wanzl & Sohn.

Trolleys first, turnstiles soon after.

Wanzl is a trolley maker before it is anything else. English Wikipedia calls it a leading manufacturer of shopping trolleys and luggage trolleys, and the Neue Deutsche Biographie says that by 1979 it held about 70 per cent of the West German market for shopping trolleys. The company’s own timeline names its 1951 fixed-basket model the Concentra, and it launched a plastic trolley, the Tango, in 2003.

Entrance control grew out of the supermarket. In the 1960s, German and English Wikipedia both say, Wanzl added manual turnstiles to its range so that ever-larger supermarkets could guide customers through the store and cut theft, and the Neue Deutsche Biographie lists turnstiles alongside shelving and complete shop fittings among its products. Railway and airport work followed: German Wikipedia says the firm first supplied luggage trolleys to Deutsche Bundesbahn stations in the 1970s and to Frankfurt Airport in the 1980s, with trolleys that could ride escalators, and later equipped the new Hong Kong airport.

The family ran the business for three generations. Rudolf junior took charge in 1969 and opened branches across Europe and in Canada; his son Gottfried Wanzl joined in 1981, led the group as managing partner from 1998 and moved to the chair of the supervisory board in 2015, after which, the Neue Deutsche Biographie says, no family members have worked in day-to-day management. The group grew by acquisition: in 2007 it bought the insolvent Brüder Siegel, the firm its former partners had founded, and in 2012 it took full control of the North American trolley maker Technibilt, in which it had held a stake since 2006, German Wikipedia says. The company’s site adds the Scandinavian shopfitter Expedit in 2017.

Recognition has come mainly from the grocery trade. German Wikipedia says the trade paper Lebensmittel Zeitung gave Wanzl its Goldener Zuckerhut award in 1978, and that the company later received the Bavarian Quality Prize.

Design and documentation.

Entrance control is a quiet corner of the building trade. Its makers sell turnstiles, speed gates, security doors and barriers to the people who plan office lobbies, stations, airports and sports grounds, and they tend to present themselves through installations rather than through logos: a row of glass gates in a tower foyer, a line of fare gates in a metro hall, a car-park barrier at a terminal.

The products fall into a few families. Glass speed gates, which open a pair of panels for each authorised person, are shown in office lobbies; full-height turnstiles, with rotors that reach above head height, are marketed for site perimeters and stadiums; mass-transit gates line metro and rail stations; and revolving security doors and portals are offered for high-risk sites. In 2026 ASSA ABLOY summed up one maker’s range as speed gates, mass transit gates and security revolving doors, which covers most of that spread.

Case studies carry much of the marketing. Gunnebo’s press releases describe speed gates fitted in Shenzhen’s Galaxy Twin Towers in 2023, and Automatic Systems’ own timeline reads as a list of metro networks, from Manila in 1983 to Stockholm in 2007. Public buyers leave a record of their own: in 2023 the Brussels transport operator STIB awarded the maintenance of the access gates in its metro and premetro stations to Automatic Systems, according to an EU contract notice.

The trade meets at security fairs. Security Essen, in Germany, held its 2026 edition and has announced the next for September 2028; Intersec, now called Intersec Global, is held in Dubai under Messe Frankfurt, with its next edition set for January 2027. Ownership is consolidating too: in August 2026 ASSA ABLOY agreed to buy Gunnebo Entrance Control, in a deal expected to close in the fourth quarter of the year.

A family group, and an access spin-off.

Wanzl remains a family company. German Wikipedia says the group’s parent, Wanzl GmbH & Co. Holding KG, is wholly owned by members of the Wanzl family, and that Peter Allaart has chaired its management since December 2024; a Wanzl press release of July 2026 also names him as chief executive. The company lists plants in Leipheim and Kirchheim in Bavaria, at Hněvotín in the Czech Republic, in Shanghai, at Newton in the United States, at Kaufbeuren and at Tibshelf in the United Kingdom. German Wikipedia says Wanzl announced in December 2025 that its two older Leipheim plants would be folded into the newer Plant 4, which houses the headquarters, by 2030. In August 2026, the company says, it raised its stake in the refrigeration and shopfitting group WSL from 30 to 51 per cent.

The entrance-control business has now left the group. Wanzl’s own website says its Access Non Retail business unit “will now be continued by our partner, axovend GmbH.” axovend, based at Breitenbrunn in Bavaria, describes itself as the “successor to Wanzl Access Solutions,” spun off through a management buy-out in 2026, and says the team and manufacturing in Germany remain. Its range includes the Galaxy Gate glass speed gate, the Sirio and EasyGo tripod turnstiles and the Atlas full-height turnstile, for gyms, offices, paid-entry sites and transport. axovend dates the start of the access division to the 1990s, while the Wikipedia articles place Wanzl’s first turnstiles in the 1960s. Wanzl still lists turnstiles, swing gates and checkout barriers among its retail products.

For a design guide, Wanzl shows how a maker of everyday steel wire can build an entrance-control line from the supermarket door outwards, and then let it go. Compare Gotschlich, an Austrian maker of gates and turnstiles, and dormakaba. For this guide we use a wire blue, zinc grey and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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