WITec Brand Guidelines: An Ulm Physics Spin-Off of 1997, Now Part of Oxford Instruments

Three physicists and a near-field microscope.

WITec began in 1997 in the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Ulm, in southern Germany. A case study published in 2014 by Wolfgang Runge of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) says three colleagues from the department — Joachim Koenen, Olaf Hollricher and Klaus Weishaupt — founded the company in June 1997, and that it was registered that August. The name is short for Wissenschaftliche Instrumente und Technologie, “scientific instruments and technology.”

The three had worked under the physicist Othmar Marti, whose institute focused on biophysics, polymer physics and nano-optics, and had spent several years developing near-field optical microscopes at the university. The company started, the KIT study says, when a university in the United States asked to buy one of those microscopes. Runge writes that the founders had first considered a business in information technology before choosing scientific instruments, the field they knew, with a plan to sell the microscopes they had built in the lab together with the know-how behind them.

The first products, as the case study lists them, belonged to one modular family: the alpha300 S near-field optical microscope, the alpha300 A atomic force microscope and the alpha300 R confocal Raman imaging microscope, alongside a measuring method called Pulsed Force Mode. WITec’s own timeline dates the alphaSNOM and Pulsed Force Mode to 1997 and the alpha300 to 1999, and calls the alpha300 the first production confocal Raman imaging microscope; that is the company’s own claim. In 1999, the KIT study adds, WITec was among the young firms honoured by the German president, Roman Herzog, in a campaign for “courageous” entrepreneurs.

The company stayed in Ulm as it grew, moving to an industrial estate and later into a building of its own in the city’s Science Park II, according to the case study.

Raman, AFM and SNOM in one frame.

WITec’s reputation rests on confocal Raman imaging, which the company presents as a tool for chemical characterisation in three dimensions, and on combining it with other techniques in a single microscope. The KIT case study describes a modular product line in which Raman, scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) can be combined in one instrument, and says the systems were used mainly in materials science, life science and nanotechnology.

The company’s own timeline lists a steady run of additions: the alpha300 RA of 2003, which it describes as the first integrated Raman and AFM microscope; TrueSurface of 2010, for topographic Raman imaging; RISE of 2014, which joins Raman imaging and a scanning electron microscope in one vacuum chamber; the automated alpha300 apyron of 2015; ParticleScout, a particle-analysis tool, in 2019; and the mobile alphaCART in 2023. In 2021 it introduced cryoRaman, a cryogenic Raman microscope that it says was developed with attocube of Munich. Its current Raman microscopes are sold under the witec360 name.

Awards form a large part of how WITec presents itself. Its website lists R&D 100 Awards in 2008, 2011 and 2022, a Pittcon Editors’ Gold Award and a Microscopy Today Innovation Award in 2011, and Photonics Prism Awards in 2012 and 2015, among others. The KIT case study records several of these from contemporary reports, including the 2008 R&D 100 Award for the alpha500, an automated Raman and AFM combination for large samples, and the 2011 awards for TrueSurface.

The company also publishes on its own field. Its website lists the textbook Confocal Raman Microscopy, in a second edition from Springer in 2018, and it runs a Raman Imaging Symposium and a WITec Paper Award.

How microscopy makers present themselves.

Microscopy makers sell instruments that most people never see, so their visual language is built from the lab itself. The typical product photograph shows a tall grey or white electron column rising from a chamber, set on a desk beside one or two monitors, often in a clean, evenly lit room with no clutter. The instrument is rarely shown working; instead, the screen beside it carries the result, and that result does much of the branding work.

Those results are the field’s most distinctive images. A scanning electron microscope produces greyscale pictures, and makers and their customers often add false colour afterwards to separate grains, cells or layers. Atomic-force and other scanning-probe instruments render a surface as a height map, frequently shown as a coloured relief or a three-dimensional landscape of nanoscale bumps and pits. Cathodoluminescence and Raman maps add another layer, turning light emitted or scattered by a sample into colour-coded images. Many makers credit these images to the university or institute that made them, which lets the customer’s science stand in for the company’s claims.

People appear mostly as scientists at workstations: a researcher seated at a monitor, a hand loading a sample holder, a small team gathered around a screen. Product names tend to be short and are often set in capitals, while technical sans-serif type and restrained blues, greys and blacks dominate websites and brochures.

Much of the presentation happens in person. Trade-show booths at meetings such as Microscopy & Microanalysis, the European Microscopy Congress (EMC) and the International Microscopy Congress are where new instruments are launched, demonstrated and photographed, and where application notes, webinars and customer publications carry the story the rest of the year.

Bought in 2021, brand kept.

WITec stayed independent for 24 years. On 16 June 2021 the British group Oxford Instruments plc announced that it had agreed to buy WITec GmbH; the purchase needed approval from Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and was completed on 1 September 2021, Oxford Instruments announced. The trade site analytica-world reported in June 2021 that WITec would join the group’s Materials Analysis Group, that Koenen and Hollricher would continue as managing directors, and that the WITec brand would be kept. In the same report Hollricher pointed to Oxford Instruments’ atomic force microscopy and scientific camera brands, Asylum and Andor, as a good fit, and an Oxford Instruments manager said the RISE product would complement the group’s analysers for electron microscopes.

The brand did stay, but its address changed. The old witec.de domain now forwards to a section of Oxford Instruments’ own website, titled “WITec Raman Imaging” and marked “Part of the Oxford Instruments Group,” where the WITec name sits under the parent’s navigation. The company says all WITec products are developed and produced at its headquarters in Ulm, and it keeps its maxim, “Focus Innovations.” It describes itself as the technology leader in Raman imaging and correlative microscopy; that is its own description.

For a design guide, WITec shows how a founder-run scientific brand can keep its name and its product language — the alpha series, then witec360 — inside a larger group. Compare Oxford Instruments, its owner since 2021, and attocube, its partner on cryoRaman. For this guide we use a laser violet, deep ink and cool greys with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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