From a Screw Warehouse to the AI Era: What the Story of REIFF Reveals About the Future of B2B Wholesale and Why 2026 Is a Turning Point
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A Century of Wholesale: How an Industry Helped Shape Germany
As some of our readers may have noticed, I really enjoy writing. To be honest, I enjoy reading even more. Sometimes, however, I cannot find what I want to read, so I write it myself. For more than ten years, I have written almost every week about the changes happening in our industry.
I follow with great respect the companies that are writing this story. Today, I want to write about one of them, a company whose story began more than 100 years ago. And despite all difficulties, that story is still not over.
For over ten years, I have been analyzing ERP data streams from technical wholesale companies. When I first looked more closely at REIFF for this article, I immediately felt that this story could tell us something fundamental about our industry. I want to make it clear that all the information I used for these three articles is publicly available or has been published on LinkedIn. This also applies to the data on revenue and profitability.
Like many companies in our industry, this story began in a small shop with a narrow storefront and a young man with a big idea. This is not only the opening line of an image film, it is also the story of an entire business model. When Albert Reiff founded his business for technical rubber goods in 1910 at the age of 24, he had no idea that it would one day become a corporate group with 1,500 employees, 80 locations, and annual revenues of 340 million euros. Nor did he know that his decisions, more than a century later, would reflect the entire German wholesale landscape like a mirror.
The scene his son Günter later describes in the company film is almost cinematic: for three days, nothing happens. No customer enters the shop. And then, finally, the first visitor arrives. Günter says: “If that customer had not come in, my father would have emigrated to America the next day.” That is not a number. It is not a KPI. That is entrepreneurship in its purest form. Courage, risk, and the willingness to try anyway. This DNA still defines B2B wholesale in Germany today. Let us take a closer look.
Those Who Spot Trends Early Win: From Motorization in 1910 to the AI Revolution in Wholesale
Only a few years after the company was founded, the First World War broke out. Albert was drafted. Just like my great great grandfather Silvestre Pedretti. Same war, different army. Albert’s wife Paula kept the shop running. After the war came inflation, economic crises, and the difficult 1920s. And yet the company kept growing.
The young entrepreneur recognized early on the demand for technical rubber products in textiles, leather, and agriculture, as well as the growing importance of the automobile. He saw trends before they appeared in statistics. He understood: “Whoever can deliver technical products while others are still searching for them has a foundation for survival.”
This early phase is strikingly similar to what we are experiencing today in the digital world. Back then, it was motorization that changed everything. Today, it is digitalization, e-commerce, and artificial intelligence. Those who recognize how the market is shifting early gain an advantage. Those who wait are hoping for that famous first customer and risk that this time, they may not arrive in time.
In 1931, REIFF + Cie. was founded, offering technical industrial supplies, automotive accessories, and vulcanization services. In 1942, Albert Reiff died at the age of 56. Paula Reiff and Ernst Geisel took over the management.
In the post-war years, Günter Reiff took the lead. He can be seen and heard in the company’s image video. He speaks with a calm and steady voice, like someone who would still witness and shape many changes to come. After the end of the Second World War, the company’s facilities had been destroyed by air raids. Reiff returned from captivity and, as he puts it himself, stood “in front of nothing but rubble.” Yet he rebuilt everything.
This idea of “starting all over again” is something many German family-owned businesses know from their own history. It is this courageous spirit that would later shape the years of the economic miracle. By the way, my great great grandfather emigrated to Argentina.
The Golden Decades of Wholesale: Growth, Courage, and the Rise of a Family Business
But every era brings not only growth, but also new pressures. This is exactly where the part of the story begins that is more relevant today than ever before. In the 1950s and 1960s, business took off. Baden-Württemberg became Germany’s industrial model region. Mechanical engineering and the automotive industry expanded, and the Mittelstand was booming.
“Gummi Reiff” became a household name. If there was a technical challenge in the region, people found help in Reutlingen. The same was happening all over Germany, in Essen, Wuppertal, Nuremberg, or Leipzig. Technical wholesalers became the backbone of industrialization. They supplied factories, workshops, and craftsmen. They knew their customers by name. And they were deeply rooted in their regions.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the third generation entered the family business with Eberhard and Hubert Reiff. Fun fact: I was only born in 1977. The company was restructured, and the different business units were consolidated under REIFF GmbH. The group expanded faster, acquired distributors, and opened new locations.
In the mid-1980s, a new logistics center was built, and the main catalog for technical products was modernized. The idea behind it was supply security, broad product range, and technical expertise from one source. What was considered an “absolute novelty in German technical trade” at the time was, at its core, exactly what wholesale had always been: scaled service for complex needs.
The 1990s brought internationalization. Acquisitions in Luxembourg and Belgium followed, as well as the founding of a subsidiary in Poland and sourcing partnerships in China. At the same time, the technical trading business was clearly separated from the tire and elastomer business. REIFF focused on its core fields while building new structures. The 2000s brought new administration buildings, logistics centers, and production sites. In 2010, the company launched its own e-shop and pushed e-commerce forward, which at the time was still considered a competitive advantage, but has since become standard.
From Success Story to Turning Point: How Digitalization and AI Are Redefining Wholesale
At the end of the image film released in 2017, the company proudly sums up its achievements: 80 locations, eight subsidiaries, 1,500 employees, 340 million euros in revenue, and 140,000 products, from individual parts to complete assemblies. The sentence that stays with you is this: “What has not changed in 100 years is that our employees remain at the center of our thinking. That is what defines a family business, and it is what we want to build on in the future.”
This contains everything that made German wholesale strong. Regional roots. Humanity. Expertise. Loyalty. Long-term thinking. At the same time, this story also reveals, in hindsight, where the limits of these traditional strengths lie. Because the world outside has not only changed, it has accelerated. Motorization came slowly. AI in sales, wholesale, e-commerce, platform economics, Predictive Sales B2B, and tools like ChatGPT are changing business within years, not decades. This is where the bridge to the present begins.
When we talk about “digitalization in wholesale” today, we are not speaking theoretically. Qymatix has shown through successful implementations that companies with a clear data strategy and digitized processes can become significantly more productive and improve their return on sales. At the same time, our analysis of B2B wholesalers and manufacturers in Europe shows how much pressure is increasing from direct sales and digital platforms. The old rules no longer apply.
CALCULATE NOW THE ROI OF QYMATIX PREDICTIVE SALES SOFTWARE
Conclusion: Why the Next Wholesale Success Story Must Be Data-Driven
The story of REIFF shows that family businesses can survive wars, fires, crises, and disruptions if they invest, stay courageous, and recognize trends early. But it also shows how high the demands have become.
In a world of 140,000 products, international supply chains, tight margins, and digital customers, intuition alone is no longer enough. It takes data. It takes algorithms. It takes AI in sales. And it takes the courage to make decisions today that will secure the next twenty years.
When I started writing this article, I did not expect the story of this company to interest me so much that I would end up writing parts two and three. But that is how it goes. So now you will have to wait one week for the next part.
In the next article we will take a closer look at the recent crisis in technical wholesale, at the fate of traditional companies like REIFF, and at why their story says so much about the future viability of the entire industry. Because every story reaches a moment when the past can no longer explain what comes next. For REIFF, that moment begins in 2017 and leads directly into the center of a market disruption.
If you want to prepare for it, I recommend our Wollschläger series as required reading.
It clearly shows how a wholesale company, despite its strong history, can fail because of invisible structural problems, and how Predictive Sales B2B and data-driven customer analytics could have made a difference back then. Perhaps that is the most important lesson of this era: every generation of wholesale reaches its own turning point sooner or later.
I WANT PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS FOR B2B SALES.
Further Read:
REIFF Technische Produkte GmbH. (2025). Unternehmensgeschichte. Abgerufen im Dezember 2025 von
Reiff-Gruppe. (2019). YouTube Kanal.
Amtsgericht Stuttgart. (2025). HRA 735135 – REIFF Technische Produkte GmbH – Jahresabschlussunterlagen 2020–2024