Sew on.
| Auteur | Mawson, Emily |
| Fonction | Business: made in Switzerland |
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When Hollywood actress Katherine Heigl was recently spotted with her newly purchased BERNINA sewing machine, the Swiss company rejoiced. Their campaigns to encourage creativity and remove sewing from the cupboard of time-gone-by, where many people had chucked it along with handwritten letters and pen-and-paper games, had received high-profile recognition.
"The biggest challenge this industry faces is not competition. It's the image of sewing," says BERNINA International AG owner and Chairman of the Board of Directors, Hanspeter Ueltschi. On display in his office are several generations of sewing machines, from the first BERNINA household sewing machine--made of iron and thus "very heavy"--to the latest models with plastic bodies and computerised display screens. "Do you like this?" he asks, pointing at the recent BERNINA 830.
"It looks sleek and appealing," is my honest reply. "One of our priorities--besides a good sewing machine--is a good-looking sewing machine," he admits of his endeavours to present sewing as an "attractive, inspirational hobby" rather than a housewife's pastime.
The sewing landscape
As a trend for handicrafts trickles into society following the global popularity of so-celled 'sewing cafes' (like an internet cafe, but with sewing machines) and TV shows like Project Runway (in which fashion designers compete to create the best clothes), Ueltschi has high hopes. BERNINA's (used as shorthand for BERNINA International AG) subsidiaries include American quilting fabrics manufacturer Benartex Inc. and Brewer Sewing, a company selling sewing supplies. "We don't just want to make the best sewing machine. My vision is to cultivate the sewing landscape, he says.
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Ueltschi has implemented his entrepreneurial ideas since 1988, when be replaced his mother at the helm of the only family-owned sewing machine company in the world. His list of achievements includes establishing America as a key market, building a manufacturing outlet in Thailand, expanding into new markets (such as Russia and India), and introducing the computer age to the business with the artista 180, BERNINA's first sewing computer.
This model is a world away from the days of the inaugural sewing machines, in the mid-eighteenth century, German engineer Charles Frederic Weisenthal tried to create a machine to propel the sewing needle...
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