We spent a week in Bochum, in the Ruhr valley in Germany, to begin our work with Eickhoff, in partnership with FireCanBurn. Days of qualitative interviews and workshops with the leadership and the teams, inside the machine factory and the foundry, mapping the company's culture and what it wants to be in the coming decades. This is the groundwork for the brand platform and the identity, which continue in development through next year.
Eickhoff was founded in 1864, when coal mining was turning the Ruhr into Germany's industrial heartland, and has belonged to the same family ever since, now in its fifth generation. Under the holding Gebr. Eickhoff Maschinenfabrik und Eisengießerei, the group brings together mining technology, drive technology, a machine factory and a foundry, with subsidiaries on several continents and more than a thousand people.
Eickhoff's shearer loaders are among the world's references in coal mining, and the same expertise in gearing for extreme environments took the group into wind energy: more than 10,000 gearboxes installed in turbines worldwide, adding up to 23 gigawatts. A company born in coal that now moves the wind, and that needs a brand to match that story.
