«Company anniversary: 25 years of CREAMETAL»

Review anniversary celebration

25 years ago, CREAMETAL AG was founded in Bern's Mattequartier thanks to a good portion of coincidence. Today, the company has its headquarters in Kappelen/BE and works as a supplier for metal construction companies and locksmiths around the globe. The anniversary celebration took place with 100 invited guests.

Numerous visitors streamed into the factory halls and were welcomed by the current owner, Mario Weber, and the company's founder, Thomas Zimmermann. Weber reported on the past year, which had been enormously intensive but also very successful due to the new invention, the CREA-WHEEL. In July 2022, the company was awarded the Federal Prize for Innovative Craftsmanship. "CREAMETAL is on an expansion course. In many areas of the company, we are in a more solid position than ever before. I owe this above all to my loyal employees. I look forward to the coming decades in the company," Weber concluded his welcoming speech.

Looking back: How it all began

Thomas Zimmermann, now a member of the board of directors, looked back to the founding year 1997: "The Swiss construction industry had some tough years behind it. So had my father's locksmith's shop, Karl Zimmermann AG. Orders were falling through more and more often, and the margins had even become meagre." Large companies had sold products at dumping prices that they spurned in "normal" times: Railings, for example. Karl Zimmermann AG also felt the impact of the big companies' entry into this very business sector. "So, what should we do, my father asked himself? Our whole family was hatching ideas for the continuation of our company."

The Egg of Columbus

On his daily walk out of the kitchen, Hans Zimmermann founded the Egg of Columbus. The extendable, slightly rusty pan base, which had probably been in the family inventory for 50 years, was to become the railing innovation of the decade. The team succeeded in oversizing the ladle base so that rods in the railings could be produced flexibly using a scissor system. The pilot series of this oversized pan base laid the foundation for the CREAMETAL company and the CREA-STAR railing solution.  In the very first year, it won the Bavarian State Prize for particularly innovative achievements in the craft sector, and to date the CREA-STAR has been sold well over 1,200 times all over the world - along with a dozen other solutions for mechanical engineering that the company offers.