Miele Case Analysis

Miele is a German manufacturer of high-end domestic appliances and commercial equipment, headquartered in Gütersloh, Ostwestfalen-Lippe, Germany. The company was founded in 1899 by Carl Miele and Reinhard Zinkann, and has always been a family owned and run company.

Miele’s first products were a cream separator, butter churn, and tub washing machine, under the Meteor brand. Carl Miele supervised manufacturing personally, and Reinhard Zinkann apprenticed and handled finances and sales.

The Míele trademark was used very early on and appeared on all machines, nameplates, printed materials and advertising produced by the company. From the mid-1920s, a recognition feature of the logo has been a sloping dash used as the dot on the “i”.

The trademark has remained unchanged apart from three minor alterations to reflect contemporary tastes.

Miele exports products to global markets and is represented in 47 countries. Their expansion into the United States came in 1983, when they established corporate headquarters in Somerset, New Jersey. They later relocated to a Michael Graves designed headquarters building in Princeton in March 1999. Products are manufactured in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Romania and shipped to the United States, where there are showrooms in ten states.