OKW HistorY / Remarkable Articles

It looks inconspicuous at first glance. A yellowed piece of paper from a typewriter and the faint stamp of a post-war economic authority in Karlsruhe. The official date typed: June 28, 1948.

If we think about it carefully, what is reflected in the document is something as significant as the birth of our family business!

Our globally active OKW Group would simply not exist today without the "Operating License No. 3394", exactly 75 years ago. The OKW story started two years earlier, in 1946, located in remote rooms at the Franz Fertig furniture factory - as a small press shop business in the Odenwald. In this place, the former high school teacher Dr Herbert Schneider had a team of technically experienced employees around him. They experimented together and improvised, organising two presses and the first orders. It was a "wild" time when there were neither materials nor machines, and everyday life was regulated by the American allied government.

Let's have a closer look at this historical letter written in German, where we can find a mention of "pressed objects made of synthetic resin material" and "wood-look synthetic material for furniture construction". At that time, plastic processing was a very new concept that was beginning to emerge. Over time, natural resins have been replaced by synthetic resins such as thermosets, saving cost and effort. This technology was also used in the newly established Odenwald plastics factory*. At first, small orders were established to develop electrical accessories such as plugs, and even razor cases no matter the quantity, later they made their way into the radio potentiometers and tuning knobs industry.

Therefore, glamour is manifested in this letter!

Back in June 1948, when Herbert Schneider held the mail from Karlsruhe in his hands, he must had sighed with relief. The rest is (our) history...

75 years ago to the present day! We should all be proud to be part of such a successful company history!

*Odenwälder Kunststoffwerk (OKW) was founded in 1948 by Dr. Herbert Schneider in the town of Buchen, Odenwald, Germany. Then in 1984 we decided to market the standard enclosures and tuning knobs through the legally independent company Odenwälder Kunststoffwerke Gehäusesysteme GmbH.

Discover An Inspirational Entrepreneur Figure

The warm Mannheim dialect always resonated slightly in his voice. He wrote his doctoral thesis about the Straits of Gibraltar, and had dreamed of becoming a diplomat. He was full of ideas. He loved sports. Love brought him to Buchen. He could easily adapt to new situations. He was a self-made man and an idealist.

Dr Herbert Schneider (1910-1973), the founder of our parent company, was a fascinating man. This rather serious photo shows him in his mid-thirties. It is a great find from the archive! According to world-renowned film director Wim Wenders, the power of a portrait lies in the fraction of a second in which you can understand something about the life of the person photographed.

At the age of 36, former high school teacher Herbert had returned from the war. He yearned for a different life. As a great freedom-lover, he found the monotony of the teaching profession restrictive. Instead of teaching pupils French irregular verbs – as he did before the war – Herbert tranformed his life by starting a business. His argument: "And when the students can do it, the next lesson approaches: how often do you want to do it?"

There was another significant reason for his career change: in 1939, the Mannheim teacher's son had married into a manufacturing family – Franz Fertig's furniture and timber products factory. Herbert supported his mother-in-law, the company owner, during and after the war on an interim basis.

Herbert wanted to become a factory owner himself. This idea grew and matured in his mind. Sometime later in 1946, he began to turn this dream into reality. This can be considered the starting point for him: the beginning of a new age. Plastic, which at that time was the material of the future, aroused great interest in him. This carried a great personal risk for Herbert as he was "unfamiliar with the subject".

But at this point, his teaching background training came into play; it would prove to be his greatest asset. He succeeded in personally convincing, finding, promoting and retaining the best employees. This was the beginning of a booming business in the 1950s and 1960s. At its peak, the company employed 700 workers.

OKW relies on one card: radio equipment

Click, hiss, sound off! The button that people used to switch on their radios in the 1950s probably came from Buchen in the Odenwald.

Simple radio buttons were the first products of the Odenwald plastics factory after the Second World War when the triumphant advance of radio took its decisive second attempt. And OKW joined the opportunity.

This remarkable fact is also shown by the first official OKW catalogue from 1955.

Translated into English, "Plastic Parts for the Radio Industry" is the title of the 28-page slim catalogue in cursive script, and the paper feels strangely rough. For the first time, the radio parts from OKW a are presented for the first time even more brilliantly in a green-brown design. The plastic parts are available in black, coffee brown, natural colour and grained (made of phenolic resin) or in the colour ivory, champagne or white (made of urea resin). They are traditionally moulded in the press shop or in the injection moulding department, which was established in 1954.

This is where the up-and-coming company presents its small but fine range. These are the first milestones in our highly varied product history.
Our parent company specialises in all kinds of radio buttons.

If you dig into the archives, the story begins with Eduard Hefner. Hefner was a man ahead of his time, tirelessly travelling the country as commercial director in search of orders. OKW was a blank canvas for radio companies. In Bremen at the Nordmende company, someone pressed a simple Bakelite button into his hand - to operate the "people's receiver" that was still common at the time. When he returned to Buchen, he was met with a shake of the head. Nevertheless, he created his own mould. With a few colour samples, from the wide range of 10,006 knob options available, in his luggage, Mr Hefner peddled it to radio manufacturers (such as Blaupunkt, Löwe Opta, Telefunken, Grundig, Siemens and Wega) being praised for his success!

But not only rotary knobs rolled off the production line successfully.

Internal parts were also pressed for the radio industry. We can find in the catalogue what was installed in the radios of that time: a “wave range indicator”, with which you could switch between short wave, long wave and medium wave.

Above all, OKW‘s drive wheels and pulleys were a big hit from the mid-1950s onwards and were distributed from the factory in large quantities. "Pointer slides", "tone colour indicators", pushbutton knobs, "antenna holders" and drive cranks also finally put the company in prosperous numbers after the harsh droughts and money worries of the early days. Press parts for television for Siemens & Halske were also taken over in 1953 with a strategic view of the upcoming medium of TV.

With approximately 340 employees (1955), OKW had developed into the largest company in the district in just a few years. The factory exported around ten per cent of its products to European countries, overseas and even East Asia.

Getting modern machines up and running and handling a wide variety of plastics is still one of the challenges in production today. Generations of OKW workers have struggled with the pitfalls of new technology ever since.

One such key moment was the switch to thermoplastics. Today’s find tells the story of the first injection moulding test, a striking point in the company’s history. An employee with a talent for drawing captured this in a wonderfully humorous way in the Schmunzelnde Chronik (1960).

In the course of modernisation, the Odenwald plastics factory set up an injection moulding department in 1955. In previous years, plastic had only been moulded. Radio buttons, switches, coil knobs and other parts of radio sets were produced from a powdery thermoset moulding compound using hydraulic and mechanical presses operating at pressures of up to 100 tonnes.

Now, however, the advantages of thermoplastics were becoming increasingly recognised. These included the fact that the material could be melted down and used again and again. The time-consuming process of deburring – removing edges, splinters and fibres from plastic parts – was also almost completely eliminated.
This modern material, the thermoplastic injection moulding compound – such as Cellidor – which we are talking about here, was heated up to 170 degrees and injected into the mould in a liquid state. During the first experiment at the OKW, it appeared to be too thin. The Cellidor took ‘terrible revenge’, the smelly broth flew around the technician’s ears. It never became a usable radio button for the radio manufacturer Nordmende.

A note pulled out of an archive box contained the proud sentence: “On 30 September 1955, Cellidor was successfully used in spraying for the first time.” This matched the caricature. Who wrote it is unknown. It is quite possible that it was the director at the time, Hans Richter (bottom right in the picture). He was the driving force behind the introduction of the injection moulding process. After acquiring knowledge of thermoplastics at a BASF training course, he purchased a secondhand injection moulding machine. The team members rolled up their sleeves and tried it out, using the principle of trial and error.

They soon got the hang of it. Thanks to the injection moulding shop, the factory went from strength to strength and the backlog of orders was completed faster and faster. Soon, a return to the press was no longer conceivable at OKW.

An important turning point in plastics production had been mastered...with expertise, patience and the power of humour.

A box of trade fair photos. Each one tells a story – or stories.

At trade fairs, the red carpet is rolled out. It‘s all about presenting yourself creatively in the metropolises of the world – far from the production halls in rural Odenwald. Industrial trade fairs are hugely important as meeting places. They were vital in our company’s pre-digital era.
OKW opened the door to the world stage remarkably early. As early as 1949, contacts were established all over the world.

Photo 1: The first event was the Great German Radio, Television and Audio Exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1955. Grey bread, sausage, schnapps and the cigarettes that were obligatory in the post-war period were served up along with a decorative rubber tree. Radio-related product innovations attracted visitors to the fair. OKW was one of the first destinations for rotary and slide control knobs as operating elements.

Photo 2: OKW presented its range of ‘flat enclosures’, as a “sensation” at the Hannover Trade Fair in 1973. In terms of product history, the plastic boxes were the initial spark for our company today. “We caused a lot of amazement among both customers and competitors,” reported Export Manager Clemens Morschhäuser in a speech.
The impetus for this world’s first standard plastic housing came from Dieter Schneider, son of the company founder. He joined the company in 1968 as a newly graduated industrial engineer. Dieter was a passionate electronics fan and had been fascinated by IT all his life. Under the wing of the junior boss (photo 2 centre), the factory began to build plastic enclosures for the electrotechnical and electronics industry. The range grew and sold like hot cakes on foreign markets.

Photo 3: At the 1977 electronics trade fair in Paris, there were already so many variants and enclosures manufactured in all sizes and colours that they were proudly presented in stacks. Finally, in 1984, Dieter Schneider dared to found his own enclosure company.

Photos 4 and 5: The 1985 Hannover Fair was regarded as a “super fair with a signal effect”. Never-ending crowds of visitors and motorcades flocked to the show, in which 7,100 companies from 44 countries exhibited. The OKW team was right in the middle in its 60-square-metre orange-brown system stand with a kitchen and two meeting booths. Founder’s son Dieter Schneider can be spotted in one of them. The walls of the stand reflect the successfully conquered new computer industry. Display housings, monitors and keyboard housings were much sought-after. Digitalisation took its course. With its innovative enclosures, OKW had vigorously braced itself against the oil price crises and recession of the 1970s. The West German economy finally found calmer waters in 1985.

Photo 6: 2023, COMPAMED Düsseldorf. The green turtle and today’s corporate design were not incorporated into the trade fair presentations until 1987.

As the pictures show, the stand design, themes and exhibition venue have changed. What remains as a common thread is the OKW trade fair stands as a stage for our products. Here there is the opportunity for technical discussions and project ideas from and for experts – in person, up close and in the midst of the exciting environment of electronic innovations.

Back To The Future: Cover design by Hans Ulrich and Ute Osterwalder, DAW books (1974)

We are looking at a secondhand American science fiction paperback from 1974, a novel about a dying Earth set a billion years in the future. The book cover is surreal and menacing – with space gaping blackly in the background. So far, so gloomy…

However, glance again and there is reason to rejoice because the cover was designed by the same artist who created the OKW turtle: the illustrator Ute Osterwalder.
Osterwalder painted the original for OKW as a commission in the summer of 1986 as part of the enclosure company’s corporate identity development. It was an oil painting and was originally much larger than the detail shown today. The Hamburg illustrator called the work Turtle in the Spiral Nebula.

If you compare the book cover with the turtle, the similarity of the brushwork and the surreal setting are striking. It is science fiction art. As with the cover of As The Curtain Falls, the dark universe opens up and the cosmos fills two-thirds of the picture.

The futuristic tone of the 1980s – from the early days of space travel, from Star Wars and from Star Trek – cannot be ignored when Osterwalder writes: “I aimed to make what I felt as tangible as what I saw, with a touch of the surreal. Not as an escape into abstruse worlds of form, but as a mirror of a possible reality.”

Born in 1939, Osterwalder studied fashion and worked for the youth magazine Twen. She designed book covers for the Phantastische Bibliothek (Suhrkamp) and album covers. In 1975 she opened her own studio in Hamburg, focussing on popular science illustrations. She worked for Der Spiegel, Stern and Die Zeit. There were also advertising commissions. Osterwalder was a professor of illustration at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. She lives in Hamburg.

The OKW turtle has lost none of its appeal to this day. The reason is probably that the decisive characteristic of the products – their stability – is embodied perfectly. The reptile with the shimmering green carapace is a ‘personified shell’. Customers, employees and management all agree on this.

But there is more below the surface. Osterwalder weaves a layer into her works that fires the viewer’s imagination and appeals to the emotional world. “Because nothing is as it seems at first glance,” says Osterwalder. “It's always the second glance that reveals worlds, deciphers thoughts and fascinates the viewer.”

It’s true: you can’t get enough of the artistically sophisticated OKW emblem. No wonder it has withstood the ravages of time for so long.

Further information about the artist: http://www.uteosterwalder.de/

Read the full interview in a special issue: https://www.okw.com/etc/INSIDE/en/OKW_Inside_turtle_1216.pdf

From Rural Roots to Industrial Excellence: How OKW Transformed Buchen and the Odenwald

Give me an ‘O’! The first letter of the company name is a statement and a reference to the location – the Odenwald.

“Here in Buchen, there was only a little woodworking, and that was it. In Hardheim there was the Eirich factory, but otherwise there was a dearth,” said Dieter Schneider in 2005, describing the post-war situation in the rural area between Heidelberg and Würzburg. It often happened that OKW employees had to interrupt their work at short notice when the hay had to be gathered in from the fields of the farms around Buchen. At that time, the way of thinking was determined by rural processes and diametrically opposed to industrial work.

The founder of the parent company, Dr Herbert Schneider, had to struggle with this transformation. But he was welcomed with open arms in the district: “OKW is one of the pioneering industrial companies that opened their doors here in the district of Buchen very soon after the collapse and the currency reform, in order to expand the scarce industrial potential,’ said District Administrator Franz Xaver Schmerbeck in 1960, praising the former sports teacher’s bold leap into the plastics business. Both men took care of the integration of the refugees in the economically underdeveloped district at that time. Around 18,000 refugees came to the district after the Second World War. Many of them had engineering know-how, as they had worked in industrial companies in their old homeland. It was a stroke of luck for the people, the town and the company: many found a job at OKW Buchen.

Herbert Schneider fought with all his heart for a positive image of the Odenwald. In a letter to the State Trade Office of Baden-Württemberg in Karlsruhe (1965), he criticised the official language:

"For years, I have been trying to attract skilled Workers to the remote areas of the Odenwald. Should the authorities in Karlsruhe repeatedly use this specific terminology, it will foster a tendency that will further complicate our already challenging efforts. We do not refer to it as the 'capital of the administrative district of Nordbaden, situated on the border,' but rather choose to overlook this detail. I would appreciate it if you could adopt a similar approach in the future."

It seems impertinent but it shows the teacher he undoubtedly was. Constant dripping, as we know, hollows out stone.

The letter shows how quickly Buchen emerged from the shadows in the course of industrialization is shown by the find of the 1971 newspaper clipping.
Nevertheless, the geographical location remained a handicap. Even company boss Dieter Schneider had to deal with it. “Of course, if you look at it from a purely mathematical point of view, I would say that we have certain locational disadvantages. But I believe that these can be offset by good products and a well-thought-out strategy. We deliver to the USA, Australia and even Japan. This shows that it is a truly sophisticated and highly technological product,” he emphasised in a radio interview in 1989.

Since then, products and services that set global standards have been coming from the region, which used to be known only as ‘Baden's Siberia’. It is ‘Made in Germany’ in the best sense of the term – the Buchen site is now more of a statement than ever! The intensive renovation work and massive investments made by the Schneider family here at the headquarters in recent years are a testament to this. The so-called ‘backwoods’ look very different now.