When Günter Blase drives to igus on his 90th birthday, as he does on many days of the year, the company founder can currently see the construction progress of the new company building on the B8. The new building is being constructed next to the headquarters in Cologne Porz-Lind. This is where igus GmbH develops and produces motion plastics, high-performance plastics for moving applications. The tribopolymers make moving parts lubrication-free, quiet and light - in theater stages, mountain bikes or office furniture, as well as in offshore drilling rigs, crane systems, ships and space rockets.

However, in 1965, one year after the company was founded, this was still unthinkable when the first motion plastics were created in a 55 square meter garage in Cologne-Mühlheim. Günter Blase had recognized the potential of plastic early on and how injection moulding could streamline the industry. After eight years of permanent employment in a company in the plastics industry, he decided to become self-employed. His wife Margret, who also celebrated her 90th birthday in April this year, supported this idea. As a self-employed tax consultant, she also took over the accounting and finances of the new company, while Günter Blase focused on production. For six years, igus produced motion plastics out of this garage as a pure contract manufacturer for a small number of industrial customers.

56 years later, a replica of this very garage stands in front of the 90,000 square meter igus factory campus designed by architect Sir Nicholas Grimshaw in 1994 to mark the 90th birthday of the founding couple. Inside the replica, some milestones in the company's history can be seen, such as the first injection molding machine. The portfolio now comprises 200,000 parts from stock and ranges from energy chain systems that can be calculated online with a guarantee to intelligent 3D-printed special parts and robotic components for a low-cost entry into automation.

The more than 4,500 employees in 35 igus branches worldwide work every day to ensure that customers can improve their technology and save costs with motion plastics. To this day, igus has to take one of Günter Blase's maxims to heart, and it is more relevant than ever: "We must always be prepared for minus 50 and plus 50 percent". And so the early expansion of machine and raw material warehouse capacities during the pandemic is currently still ensuring comparatively fast delivery times in a phase of rapid economic recovery. The new factory building is intended to drive this development forward in the future. A project that Günter Blase, an architecture enthusiast, is still actively involved in today.