HEINZ-GLAS: Four Centuries of Bringing Perfume-Bottle Design into Production

“We are known in the market for the quality of our decoration.”
Carletta Heinz, CEO, 2021

When we pick up a perfume bottle, it is the perfume brand’s name that we see. The company that repeatedly achieves the same outline, clarity, and surface colour is less visible. HEINZ-GLAS is one of the glassmakers working behind the scenes. With its origins in a German family business, it has developed, formed, and decorated containers for perfume and cosmetics.

Tradition here does not mean continuing to make old bottles by the same methods. It is a history of designing moulds, using automatic forming machines, and renewing furnaces, with a family and its employees taking responsibility for those changes. From a position distinct from that of the fragrance creator, this article follows the work that makes perfume possible as an object of everyday use.

Key Facts
From a Glassmaking Family to an International Family Business
Reproducing a Shape and Giving It Different Expressions
Electrifying Furnaces and the Wider Challenges of Manufacturing
References

Key Facts

Company founded: 1622, in Piesau, Thuringia, Germany
Founders: Hans Heintz, together with Peter Bock, Hans Dietz, and Georg Schott
Headquarters: Kleintettau, Bavaria, Germany
Management: Carletta Heinz, CEO and owner
Main activities: Development, manufacture, and decoration of glass containers for perfume and cosmetics, and supply of related packaging components
Official website: HEINZ-GLAS

From a Glassmaking Family to an International Family Business

A Family Tradition Since 1523, a Company Since 1622

The Heinz family’s involvement in glassmaking dates back to 1523. HEINZ-GLAS, however, gives 1622 as the company’s founding year. These dates refer respectively to the history of the family’s occupation and to the starting point of the business that developed into the present company.

The official timeline dates Hans Heintz’s establishment of the glassworks and settlement at Piesau with three associates to 1621/1622. Treating 1621 alone as a separate company founding date, or assuming that the same company existed in 1523, would confuse these different measures of history. In 1661, a son of the Piesau founder joined two members of the Müller family from Lauscha in establishing the Kleintettau glassworks.

The Fire of 1904 and Continuity Through Changing Equipment

In 1904, the old village glassworks at Kleintettau burned down. Carl August Heinz established a new production site at the lower end of the village, moving from the old wood-fired works to modern melting equipment using producer gas. Rebuilding to preserve the family business was also an opportunity to change its manufacturing methods.

The twentieth century brought increasing automation and a wider range of materials. Plastic-container manufacturing was added to the business in 1955. In 1971, Kleintettau introduced an all-electric melting furnace for opal glass, designed for continuous, fully automatic operation. Today’s electrification did not begin suddenly; it is also connected with the history of producing milky-white glass on an industrial scale.

An Unexpected Succession and Reinvestment in Piesau

Carl-August Heinz joined the company in 1976. After studying business at university, he had intended to gain experience at an American glassmaker. His father Adolf died, however, and in 1977 he had to take sole responsibility for management. This was not a succession that unfolded according to plan after years of preparation.

One important subsequent decision was to invest in Piesau around the time of German reunification. In 1991, he acquired all the shares in the glassworks there and restructured its equipment. The place where the company began was reintegrated into the business as a modern production site. Expansion abroad and investment in its point of origin proceeded in parallel.

The Business Carletta Heinz Inherited

His daughter Carletta completed her business-administration degree in 2012. That year, she also founded CityHunters with three fellow students, taking responsibility for bookkeeping, management accounting, taxes, and payroll. She entered the family business in 2013, supported by her father and an external mentor, and joined the management team as CIO in 2017. On 1 July 2020, she succeeded her father as CEO. The company identifies this succession as the thirteenth generation of its founding family.

In 2021, Carletta recalled the ambition she first wrote down at the age of six:

“I wanted to be the chief of the company.”
Carletta Heinz, recalling her childhood ambition in 2021

Despite that childhood aspiration, her practical entry into the business began with numbers and organisation. She gained experience in management accounting and human resources, made sustainability a strategic business objective in 2014, and established a global team responsible for it. This was a way of treating the family company’s future as an organisational responsibility rather than a matter of individual will alone.

In her account of October 2026, the company’s core work encompasses in-house design and development, custom mould making, glass production, and a wide range of decoration and finishing. The successor inherited more than a factory that makes bottles. She took on a connected sequence of work that proposes a shape, transfers it into volume production, and completes its surface appearance.

Reproducing a Shape and Giving It Different Expressions

In-House Development and Moulds: Connecting Design with Automatic Forming

HEINZ-GLAS places its in-house development department and mould making at the centre of its technical capabilities. It works with clear colourless glass, white opal glass, and glass coloured in the feeder, using fully automatic IS forming machines. IS refers to equipment composed of individual forming sections. Cut portions of molten glass, known as gobs, are delivered into moulds and formed into containers.

Its published forming methods include blow-and-blow, in which air creates both the preliminary and final forms; press-and-blow, in which the preliminary form is pressed before being blown; and press forming. This is not simply a matter of making large quantities by machine, but of organising the process around the requirements of the shape and container. The company describes equipment handling one to three gobs and its proprietary flex technology, which is intended to provide flexibility across large and small quantities.

The mould allows a design to emerge repeatedly with the same outline. This is where the work of those who conceive the shape meets the work of those who operate the production equipment. Even an automatically produced bottle contains design decisions about which stage will create its form.

Mirra: Customising the Moulds of a Standard Bottle

The standard-container collection Glasmeisterwerke offers another way to begin with an existing shape. Its 2026 Mirra concept demonstrates how a standard bottle can be adapted by customising the finishing mould and base mould. The approach changes the appearance while limiting the scope of investment in development and moulds.

Mirra takes myrrh as its subject. The movement of smoke rising from burning resin is translated into a structure on the glass surface, combined with a matt white spray finish and a treatment that leaves the base transparent. The stopper is also given an organic shape reminiscent of a lump of resin. This is the company’s packaging concept, not an explanation of the composition of a perfume called Mirra.

A screw neck is also a design feature that supports refilling and separation of the components. It is a concrete example of how design, moulds, finishing, and handling after use intersect within a single bottle.

Distinguishing the Colour of Glass from the Colour of Its Finish

A bottle’s colour does not depend solely on the colour of the glass itself. HEINZ-GLAS offers decoration techniques including frosting, sandblasting, single- and multicolour spraying, metallisation, laser processing, pad printing, and silk-screen printing. Partial coatings and treatments are also possible, and the official examples include interior spraying.

The same outline can look different depending on which areas remain transparent and where metallic reflections are introduced. As Mirra’s combination of mould design and white finishing shows, three-dimensional form and surface treatment are separate choices that can be designed in combination. This depth of process lies behind the opening observation about the quality of the company’s decoration.

Researching Coatings and Inspection Between Production Stages

Maintaining quality requires more than looking over a finished bottle at the end. In August 2025, the 2HD decoration facility in Działdowo, Poland, announced an EU-supported research and development project. It proposed to investigate how mixing conditions, the composition of colour materials, and the material being coated affect coating quality, and to develop models and algorithms for controlling the preparation of those materials.

Alongside research into new inks, the project includes autonomous transport between production stages with integrated visual inspection. Rather than separating the preparation of colour, its application, and the movement of products, it seeks to manage quality across the connections between processes. This is an announced development project, not an inspection method already operating across every site.

Electrifying Furnaces and the Wider Challenges of Manufacturing

Replacing Piesau’s Gas Furnace with an Electric Furnace in 2024

How to supply the heat needed to melt glass is a major question in perfume-bottle manufacturing. At Piesau in 2024, production was halted from March while the gas furnace was dismantled and replaced with an all-electric melting furnace. The new furnace was presented on 16 September, with production scheduled to restart in October.

According to the company’s announcement, the equipment could melt 70 tonnes of glass a day, and investment in this first stage was approximately €17 million. These figures describe the furnace capacity and investment at that plant, not the entire group’s production or emissions reductions. By then, both melting furnaces at Kleintettau were also electric.

The 2026 Furnace Renewal and the Work of Maintaining Equipment

In April 2026, the company announced the commissioning of a new electric melting furnace, Josephine, at Kleintettau. The investment was approximately €13 million. Draining the glass from the old furnace, cooling and dismantling it, building the replacement, and heating it up took around fourteen weeks. Beyond deciding to electrify, there is a long process of renewing equipment and returning it to production.

“Building a furnace is always a major undertaking that can only be achieved through teamwork.”
Carletta Heinz, April 2026

The company states that, since 2024, its German glass-production sites have used only all-electric melting furnaces, melting glass with CO₂-free electricity. This description concerns electricity and the melting stage. It does not mean that the emissions of the entire bottle, including raw materials, transport, and subsequent processing, are zero.

Energy Prices and Later Stages Remain Challenges After Electrification

“Rising energy costs therefore remain one of the heaviest burdens on our business, particularly in Europe.”
Carletta Heinz, October 2026

In October 2026, Carletta explained how Germany’s electric melting facilities are exposed to fluctuations in electricity prices. She also described ongoing research and development into electrifying feeders that deliver molten glass to forming machines, cooling lines, and furnaces used in decoration. Electrifying melting furnaces and the future goal of eliminating fossil fuels from the entire manufacturing process are not the same milestone.

Nor does collecting used glass and returning it to a furnace solve every issue. The 2020/2021 sustainability report discusses products using post-consumer glass, lightweighting, and designs intended for refilling. The materials used to make a container, how many times it is used, and what happens after collection need to be considered together. It is also important not to treat a stated recycled-material percentage as a figure common to every product the company makes.

HEINZ-GLAS shows that producing perfume bottles at scale involves more than multiplying the outer forms that hold a fragrance. It means reproducing a shape through moulds, changing its expression through surface treatment, and managing conditions of quality and energy. The continuity of a family business lies in continually renewing the equipment and organisation that will allow the next generation to carry out this work.

The work of transferring perfume-bottle design into volume production is also explored in Pochet’s glassmaking and decoration. Looking at how different manufacturers connect form, materials, and equipment broadens our understanding of how perfume is made.