SSI Schaefer is celebrating its 50th birthday in the UK. The company was founded by Fritz-Schaefer in 1937 in Burbach, Germany, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that it started to focus on international markets.
The UK was one of the first two companies set up outside Germany. The other was in Switzerland.
Mike Bell, Customer Service Manager, has been with the company 47 years, joining in 1964, starting out as an office junior at the age of 15, and remembers the first UK made shelf unit that was manufactured.
He said: “When I started there were no such things as computers or mobile phones and an electronic typewriter was considered very high tech. Salesmen had to ring in daily from a public telephone box to pick up their messages.”