History

The Beginning

The name of the Bantlin family from Reutlingen can be traced back to the year 1410

The history of our business started around 1752 with Georg David Bantlin in a store selling leather goods in Reutlingen at today's Nikolaiplatz. Only few businesses in Germany can look back to such a long tradition. In 1875, Paul Lothar, the great-grandson of Georg David, founded the business Bantlin at the bank of the creek Echaz in today's Emil-Adolff-Strasse. The business included a tannery as well as a production place of transmission belts and saddling goods with the leather being processed and tanned in a pit (German: "Grubengerbung") . The World Depression in the 1930s had a great impact on the dealings of the business. During this time people only worked one or two days a week. Paul Bantlin traveled to Berlin in 1940 asking the government to spare him from the military service of the Third Reich. Only this guaranteed the company's future.
The tannery was discontinued in the post war years. However, they specialized in the further processing of tanned leather producing transmission belts and all sorts of industrial leather products. In the years of the economic boom, the company revived their business. Paul Lothar's sons, Hans and Paul, took over the business in 1958. They determined the success of the business in form of a "GmbH" (English: company with limited liability), as well as they put up a new building which was located in Bismarckstrasse in Reutlingen.



The New Management

In 2001, the employees Dr. Rigo Herrmann and Martin Janessa took over. Both executives are committed to the tradition of the long-established company and to continuous innovation - a synonym for quality, high power, and focus on future technologies at the highest level. Until today, this concept assures the company's position in the world: the Bantlin GmbH is one of the leading businesses specialized on the production of leather goods for industrial purposes and technical wholesale. The company is well-known in the area and farther as a service provider for industrial fittings in the field of transmission belts, conveyor belts, and ropebelt conveyors. The clientele ranges from South Africans to Brazilians and Russians from different business areas like electronics, representatives of the Scandinavian furniture industry, sawmills and wood-processing businesses, special and printing machines, jewelery manufacturers, hydroelectric power plants and recycling plants, industrial wholesale, sports (horse-riding, dogs), regional carnival guilds, and industrial museums.