A family affair

Chris BIDDLE, Editor of Service Dealer, joined the Wolf family for a celebration of half-a-century of innovation and success.

As family dynasties go, the Wolf family is amongst the most successful and wellknown in the European gardening market. But is has also been possibly the most fractious and split family ot them all.

The facts themselves are straightforward.

August Wolf started a garten tools business, Wolf-Geräte, in Betzdorf-an-der-Sieg in Germany in 1923, later handing over the business to his son, Gregor.
Gregor had three sons, Elmar, Dieter and Roderich who, for whatever reason, found difficulty working together.
Gregor’s solution was to split the company three ways.

Dieter took on Wolf-Geräte in Germany; Elmar was to set up a separate lawnmower business Outils Wolf just over the French border in Wissembourg in 1958, whilst Roderich went to the UK and established Wolf Tools based in Ross-on-Wye.
At the same time, Gregor set down a number of restrictions on how and where the three brothers could trade, limiting them essentially to selling within their country borders.
Today, those three companies are still independent companies, with the French-based Outils Wolf company being the only one still in the hands of members of Wolf family.

Roderich has sold his interest in Wolf Tools UK, whilst Wolf-Geräte has been sold to outside investors whose interests also include German-based gun manufacturer Heckler & Koch (previously owned by British Aerospace).
The name Outils Wolf is not known in the UK, nor can it trade over here, but the company is a prolific producer of mowers with up to 1 000 units a day coming out of its Wissembourg factory.
However, the company is better known in the UK for its wholly-owned brand which this year celebrates 20 years in business.

This year Outils Wolf celebrates its 50th Anniversary, and to mark the occasion the company invited more than 150 guests from the world of politics, commerce, local goverment, media as well as its business partners to a reception held at its Wissembourg headquarters on 6 June.

Mr François Loos, the former Minister of Industry & Trade for the Bas-Rhin region congratulated Outils Wolf on its achievements, adding that recent research showed that a third of French firms has failed to innovate or develop new products during the past five years, “Whereas Outils Wolf has consistently committed 5% of its turnover year-on-year to research and development”.
Responding Elmar Wolf, now in his mid-80s and head of the holding company Société Elmar Wolf that owns Outils Wolf and , said that the secret of success was, “manufacturing new products that are better than others; never spending more money than we had and retaining all profits in the business to enable us to be financially independent”.

It was a message reinforced by his son, Pierre the 4th generation of Wolf family to take the helm. “Manufacturers today face many challenges,” he said, “but our strength is that we are big enough to be strong, but small enough to be independent and flexible.”
“In a world where the gap between low cost and high technology products is getting bigger and bigger, we will resist temptation and keep to our ‘niche’ policy for manufacturing high-spec quality products.”

AND that policy is best illustrated by the development of the range over the past 20 years.
Under Elmar’s guidance, Outils Wolf has always been a progressive company, growing steadily, investing heavily from self-generated resources without the need for external funding.

Shackled by internal trading restrictions in the mid-1980s, the company decided to produce a range of heavy duty commercial grass cutting equipment which would be manufactured and marketed though a separate company – and so free from existing restrictions.
The internal reasoning behind the creation of is shrouded in the mists of time. The name itself is said to have been dreamed up by Elmar Wolf’s wife one Sunday afternoon.
The name ‘’ was intended to be a ‘neutral’ word without specific meaning or translation although some say it is the name of a wind in India.
Whatever the origins, ETESIA has been a ‘slow-burn’ success for the French Wolf company.
Careful to exclude any reference or link to Wolf on Etesia products so as not to break trading agreements, the machines are manufactured in a stand-alone modern factory a few hundred yards from the Outils Wolf HQ.

The Etesia story really started back in 1985 at a time when Wolf was the French distributor of the Swedish-built Stiga Park mowers.
They did such a good job, that Stiga took away their distribution rights and set up its own operation in France.
‘The Stiga Park was such an important machine to us,” recalls present day ETESIA managing director Patrick Vivès who has been with Wolf since the mid-1970s, “that we investigated getting a similar model manufactured elsewhere”.
The company started talks with Westwood but the family were concerned that the machines would still not be under their direct control.
So in 1985, Wolf committed around 60 million francs into research and development and the build of a brand new manufacturing plant for their new brand, Etesia.
By 1989, the first Etesia machine, a rear discharge tractor mower, was ready to launch.
The following year, a group of UK dealers were invited to France to see the machine put through its paces. The performance, and potential were obvious to see – but without an established dealer network, progress was always going to be slow.
For almost 10 years, Etesia remained a niche product, a product that attracted a few enthusiasts but which did not attract volume business.
There is little doubt, that without the vision, the commitment and the financial support of Wolf, Etesia might well have failed to reach its potential in any other hands.
Today, Etesia exports 50% of its production, a large percentage of which comes to the UK.
The company is now an important cog in the range of equipment that many dealers have chosen to offer their customers.
And more importantly, more and more users are specifying Etesia as their machinery of choice – and that is something that no manufacturer ears a right.

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