Böttcher Systems

About us
Felix Böttcher is run in the eighth generation as a family business and goes back to the tanner master Johannes Jacobus Loosen (1702 – 1775), who opened his own company in 1725 in Cologne. From 1825, the company also devoted to the glue boiler. The first contacts with the printing industry came in 1891, when Otto Loosen (in the fourth generation) produced gelatine for printing rollers for the first time. As early as 1878, the namesake of today’s group of companies, Felix Böttcher, had begun producing roll stock in Leipzig. However, he died early and in 1892 Ernst Hermann the Widow bought the company. Just one year later, the new owner turned the company over to the production of finished rolls. This innovation (until then, the printers had coated their rolls with the supplied gelatin itself) prevailed quickly and around the turn of the century, the company had become an important partner of the printing industry with branches in Munich and Berlin. At the same time, Wilhelm Loosen had come under fierce competition in Cologne, and in 1910 he accepted the cooperation offer of Leipzig roller manufacturer Ernst Hermann from Felix Böttcher. Both founded a limited liability company in which they each held a 50 percent stake and laid down a clear division of labor in the articles of association: Leipzig supplied the roll mass, Cologne produced the finished gelatine rolls. The company grew – also through acquisitions of smaller competitors – and employed in 1922 alone in Cologne 28 employees.