igus: global manufacturer with a playful mentality

15.11.2023

Frank Blase is CEO of igus, a Cologne-based company specialising in plastics and synthetic materials. The company recently achieved a turnover of around one billion euros. A conversation about plastic bicycles, robots and a startup mentality that Frank Blase inherited from his family.

Mr Blase, your father, Günter Blase, founded the company igus with his wife Margret in 1964 in a garage in Cologne. How much courage did it take back then to start a company?

It took a huge amount of courage. My parents not only founded the company, they also didn't have a single machine or any employees at the beginning. My father, an engineer in the wood industry and long-time factory manager of a plastics company in Cologne, had set up his own business and now had a wife and two children at home who needed to be fed. So he plucked up all his courage, went to the automotive supplier Pierburg and said: "Give me your most difficult part and I'll find a solution for it."

That does indeed sound brave. What part are we talking about?

It was a valve cone for a vehicle carburator. The most knowledgeable engineers had cut their teeth on a clever solution, but my father saw it as a challenge. He wanted to approach the component in a completely different way, moulding it out of plastic using an injection moulding machine. My father then experimented until he found the perfect solution. That was certainly courageous, but in part, also stubborn and improvised.

Would you say this kind of mentality still exists today?

Absolutely. I see this kind of courage on a daily basis in our company, which has grown a lot, but also in the many startups in Cologne and the surrounding area. Lots of these startups share a common characteristic with us: an entrepreneurial spirit and the desire to make everything just a little bit better.

A lot has happened at igus since 1964. As the successor, you have turned the startup into a huge company, from a turnover of 1.4 million euros in 1983 to around one billion euros. The only thing that hasn't changed is the fact that you're based in Cologne. What keeps you in the city to this day?

The diversity and attractiveness for young people moving here. The breadth of industry, which is often underestimated from the outside and allows you to organise a very good supply chain, is certainly another positive factor. Added to this is the huge innovative spirit, which I particularly appreciate. I think Cologne shows that you don't have to go abroad to save money and improve the product. You can also do this, especially with a Cologne-based company.

You have over 4,000 employees worldwide. Where do you recruit the best Munds?

We recruit many workers from the region, directly from the universities in Cologne and surrounding region. As a company, we have also set up an adult training programme with the local Chamber of Industry and Commerce. In recent years, we have trained almost 200 adults to become skilled workers, for example in plastic injection moulding - and all of this on full pay.

I think Cologne shows that you don't have to go abroad to save money and improve the product.

Frank Blase, CEO igus

There are always many projects running in parallel at igus. Which one is particularly close to your heart at the moment?

For me, courage always means doing something different from what everyone else has done before. The igus:bike fits in perfectly into this equation. With the igus:bike, we are currently working on the dream of a complete bicycle made of plastic that never rusts, never needs to be lubricated and can be made largely from recycled household waste. We are fulfilling this dream with DutchFiets, now renamed mtrl.bike. We have invested heavily in this company, including financially, because we believe in this dream. The first complete bikes are manufactured by mtrl.bike, with all moving parts coming from Cologne. We have also launched the igus:bike platform with the aim of enabling the bicycle industry to produce bikes made of plastic that are significantly more sustainable.

Plastics are often viewed critically. Is it still in keeping with the times to replace everything with plastics, of all things?

Anyone who uses our products can calculate the service life online and can then use products with a longer service life. If you look at the bicycle, or many other parts, you will also notice that you never have to lubricate these products, so no oil is needed. All of these are very strong contributions to sustainability.

Do you think these contributions are enough?

Of course, there is still a lot to do in terms of production and plastic waste to be on the light side of the Force, to paraphrase Star Wars. But I have to say: we are doing that too. Our goal is to be climate-neutral by 2025. And we are already well on the way to achieving this. So far, we are at 95 per cent and have many projects that are true sustainability pioneers.

Can you give us an example?

We have the chainge® range, which specialises in energy chains. These are plastic parts that are placed around cables or wires to protect them - similar to the cable duct on your own desk, but much more robust. Through the programme, we take back worn, old energy chains in exchange for vouchers and, in turn, feed these energy chains into the circular economy. This is extremely successful on the market. In the spirit of "cradle to cradle", we launched the so-called cradle chain this year, which consists of 100 per cent of this valuable waste.

For the past almost 60 years, igus always comes up with new solutions. What is your secret formula?

We draw many ideas from customer requests. Our organisation resembles a solar system. The customer is the sun, from the sun you get light and energy, i.e. revenue and ideas. Sometimes there are also sunburns, i.e. complaints. And then you have to deal with them immediately. In real life, you would have to apply cream. What we do is create new products from these complaints. Of course, this is only possible because we dare to listen to our customers and sometimes take harsh criticism. But for me, that's part of the job: If you want to aim high, you have to be brave enough to face honest criticism.

So would you say all ideas are born out of mistakes?

Not really, we have another source for our innovation and that is simply our dreams, which we conceptualise and then realise. Nobody has ever asked us for a bicycle made of plastic or a robot made of plastic. But we think they are great ideas, we pluck up the courage to realise them and are now firmly established in the robot business.

Is a robot made of plastic something realistic?

Definitely. Robots are particularly appealing to small and medium-sized companies and are also generating a great deal of interest among our customers. 40% of the hardware costs of a multi-axis robot arise from the gearbox. By making the gearbox from injection-moulded plastic - something that took many years of research and testing - we are able to reduce the cost of our robots to less than 5,000 euros, and that's including the control system.

What else is needed besides courage to be innovative?

You have to create room for manoeuvre. For example, we start new ventures with at least two colleagues from Product Development and Marketing Sales. In the case of our bicycle, we distributed development projects relating to ball bearings, gear wheels or cranks to existing specialists. Through this, we create a broader distribution and more freedom for the project. We also try to give ourselves financial breathing space for particularly important goals; if we want to supply a specific trade fair or a dream customer, we release funds for this. Many companies don't dare to open up this kind of freedom because they might see it as too much of a risk. We can do that.