Allit AG Kunststofftechnik

Allit: an undiscovered country on the other side of the tracks. It’s great to see you. Maybe you’ve visited us before, which we’d be delighted to hear, or maybe you’ve heard of us. In any case, it’s very likely that you’ve held a product of ours in your hands at some point in time. And now we are over 50 years old. Allit was founded in 1960, and the sixth generation of the same family has now taken on full responsibility. Allit’s history goes right back to 1840, and we hope that many centuries lie ahead of us too. During this brief guided tour through our small but great world, we want to demonstrate what has happened over the past 50 years alone – since we started trading under the name Allit – what makes our workforce special, how Allit has prepared itself to face the future and how our employees approach their work. Tradition means the passing of the flame, not the veneration of the ashes. (Gustav Mahler) Companies face a constant process of change, to which they have to adapt: new techno- logical developments, innovations, changing cultural attitudes, historical events. Allit itself is a perfect example of such adaptability and corporate vision, because when it was founded in 1960, Allit was in fact already 120 years old. But one should never stop starting anew, one step at a time. The leather tanning company Carl Ackva was founded in 1840. Thanks to its extreme versati- lity, leather was the premier material of the age. From gear wheels to bicycle saddles, gloves with built-in steel webbing used by workers facing extreme heat as they toiled at great furnaces, and much more besides, Carl Ackva was known for ‘making more out of leather’. Carl Ackva’s employees understood leather’s nature as a living material with great design potential, for example in gear wheels combi- ning leather and steel for a safe and noise-free production process. The passing of the flame, that flame being the idea of extracting the maximum from a material and showing responsibility in our relations with employees, customers and the region as a whole: that is what we understand by tradition and our duty to it. Even if changing times inevitably mean that what was once leather has today been replaced by plastic. 7