Celebrating 20 years of Essentra plc

We are very pleased this year to be able to mark the 20^th anniversaries of two brand names created by Appella, Essentra plc and the Gibbs Aquada car.

Essentra’s line of corporate ancestry goes all the way back to the Bunzl family and Pozsony in the Habsburg Empire, now Slovakia, where in 1854 Moritz Bunzl registered his haberdashery business. In 1883 his three sons changed the name to Bunzl & Biach AG and moved to Vienna, closer to the main European markets of the time. Here they bought a paper mill and manufactured paper, cigarette filters and cellulose wadding.

Following Hitler’s Anschluss in 1938, by which Nazi Germany annexed Austria, the family left  the country in order to avoid their company and assets being seized or destroyed as happened to all Jewish businesses. Some of the family moved to Switzerland, some to the United States and a small number moved to the UK to develop operations there. The 1950’s saw international expansion and a separate company, American Filtrona, incorporated in the USA in 1954 as a filter technology specialist, especially in cigarette filters.

Filtrona demerged from Bunzl in 2005 and went on to buy Duraco an adhesives coated products business in 2007. They continued to diversify into a multi-sector, component parts and elements manufacturing and supply business, mainly through acquisition. They re-branded in 2013 with the aim of de-coupling from their historic association with the tobacco industry, Essentra being chosen in order, as their then CEO Colin Day declared, “to capture what each of Filtrona’s businesses manufacture and supply: small but essential key components that play critical roles for our customers”.

We wish Essentra a very happy 20^th birthday.

Please stay in touch for the Aquada blog to follow shortly.