Stihl’s American plant opened a year after its founder died
Andreas Stihl died a year before his family opened a Virginia Beach chainsaw plant with 50 workers and one model, a bet that still shapes the company.
Virginia Beach, VA
In 1974, 50 people went to work in a rented 20,000-square-foot building in Virginia Beach, assembling one model of chainsaw. The name on that saw belonged to a German engineer who had died the year before.
Andreas Stihl never saw the Virginia Beach plant. His family made the call. They saw the United States as one of the largest markets in the world, and they chose Virginia Beach because it sat close to one of the country’s largest deep-water ports and had a ready labor force. Two years later the company opened Plant I and its administrative offices, 121,000 square feet in all. Plant II, at 173,000 square feet, followed in 1983. In 1986 the Virginia Beach operation built its one millionth chainsaw. It turned out its 50 millionth unit in 2012 and its 75 millionth in 2019.
Stihl has been family-owned since Andreas Stihl founded it in Germany in 1926. The American plant was a second-generation decision, and it later helped train the third. The saws themselves started with a salesman who spent time around loggers and thought their work was harder than it needed to be.
Andreas Stihl was born in Zurich in 1896. He was an engineer by training but started out in the 1920s selling for a German mill and industrial supply house. The job put him among loggers in the Black Forest, where trees were felled and bucked by hand or with stationary saws, and big timber had to be hauled to a mill to be cut. As the company tells it, he became preoccupied with a single thought: there had to be a way to make forest work easier.
In 1925 he set up a small workshop in his home in Stuttgart. To keep it going, the shop also made forehearths for steam boilers. By 1926 he had a prototype electric “cross-cutting chain saw.” It took two people to run and worked only where there was a power source. Even so, 50 sold in 1927, and Stihl opened his first factory in Stuttgart that year.
His gasoline saw came in 1929. Called the tree-felling machine, it put out 6 horsepower and weighed 101 pounds. It was still a two-man tool, but it was fully portable. It was shown at the Leipzig trade fair in 1930. Not everyone wanted it. Many loggers feared the saw would cost them their jobs, and they often attacked Stihl’s salesmen. From the start, Stihl trained buyers to run, maintain and repair what they bought, and as sales spread abroad he trained specialists in each country to do the same. By 1930 his saws were being shipped to the United States.
The company grew at home after the Nazis came to power. In competitions meant to standardize German industry, Stihl’s design became the authorized German chainsaw, and other German makers had to license it. Andreas Stihl was a member of the Nazi Party. Allied troops arrested him in 1945 and seized his company. After three years in detention he was classified as a Mitläufer, or follower, and released, and the company was returned to him.
Bombs had destroyed the plant in Bad Cannstatt during the war, and production moved to Waiblingen. By 1947 the factory had reopened and was soon producing 90 saws a month. For a time it also built farm tractors. In the United States, Stihl bought out its former importer and began assembling saws for the North American market.
The saw that changed the company’s fortunes came in 1959. The Contra was Stihl’s first gearless chainsaw, with 6 horsepower in a 26-pound body, and it brought double-digit increases in sales. In the mid-1960s Stihl became the first maker to fit a chainsaw with an anti-vibration system.
By then the founder’s two oldest children, Hans Peter Stihl and Eva Mayr-Stihl, had joined the business. Hans Peter took over as head of the company in 1971, the year Stihl became the world’s top-selling chainsaw brand, a title the company has claimed ever since. Andreas Stihl died in 1973. A younger brother, Rüdiger Stihl, joined in 1978. When counterfeit Stihl products first showed up in the early 1980s, he led the fight against product and brand piracy.
Hans Peter Stihl later pointed to two decisions that shaped everything after. One was getting out of tractors. “I think one important decision was moving away from making tractors in the 1960s and discontinuing our production of diesel engines,” he said in the company’s 95th-anniversary history, published in 2021. The other was going abroad. A plant opened in Brazil in 1973, and 1974 brought both the Virginia Beach plant and a chain factory in Switzerland. “If we had limited ourselves to the German market, we would be a relatively small company today, if we still existed at all,” he said in the same publication.
Virginia Beach soon did more than assemble. A 1980 addition to Plant I brought a tool and die shop, crankshaft heat-treating and a plastics department. In 1984 the plant started an apprenticeship program, and in 2015 that program became the first in Virginia to earn certification from the German American Chamber of Commerce. The company has described an automation cell there that molds, welds, assembles and leak-tests the fuel tank for one model in 32 seconds, and housings molded on site in the brand’s own shade of orange.
The third generation passed through Virginia Beach too. Nikolas Stihl, Hans Peter’s son, joined the company in 1992 and soon ran product management for the chainsaw business at Stihl Inc. From 1993 to 2011 he managed Viking, the Austrian garden equipment maker Stihl had taken full ownership of in 1992. In 2012 he succeeded his father as chairman of the advisory and supervisory boards.
Those boards are where the family exercises control. In 2002 it stepped back from running the company day to day and handed operations to an executive board with no family members on it. Harald J. Joos became the first nonfamily member to lead the company. The family kept ownership of the holding company and makes strategic decisions through its boards. Hans Peter Stihl has said the company should stay in the hands of his father’s descendants.
The founder’s practice of teaching customers to keep a saw running carried into the American business. In 2008 Stihl Inc. recognized its 1,000th certified Gold Level service technician, and by 2015 its network had grown to 9,000 servicing dealers. Stihl says that since 2009 it has been the top-selling brand of gas-powered handheld outdoor power equipment in America, citing industry surveys. It also brought logging skills to television, launching the Stihl Timbersports series on ESPN in 1985.
The next turn came with batteries. Stihl launched its first battery tools in 2009, two hedge trimmers, and followed with a battery chainsaw a year later. The first Stihl Inc. battery product built in the United States, the BGA 56, came off the Virginia Beach line in 2017. Battery pack assembly began there in 2022. The company says that in 2023 it became the top-selling brand of battery-powered handheld equipment among American landscape and tree care professionals. In the 2021 anniversary history, Hans Peter Stihl had named that aim: “We also want to occupy the same leading position among battery-powered tools as well.”
The company likes to set two of its products side by side. The 1929 tree-felling machine weighed 101 pounds and took two men to run. The GTA 26, a battery garden pruner Stihl Inc. introduced in 2021 as the first of its kind on the U.S. market, weighs 2.6 pounds and runs on 10.8 volts.