Grohe | Reporting from a state-of-the-art shower manufacturing plant

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Excerpt (from the print magazine)

Lahr is one of Germany’s southernmost cities, beautifully situated between Baden’s vineyards and the Black Forest. The Mediterranean climate is even warm enough for bananas and lemons to grow. It’s therefore only natural that
this sun-kissed region also produces leading experts in water technology. After all, it’s here that the world’s most innovative showers and shower systems are manufactured by 750 GROHE employees and their robotic assistants.

In one of the assembly halls, “the big Stäubli” maneuvers gracefully in and out of a massive injection-molding machine
with power and precision. This endearingly-named robot executes between 60 and 80 different operations over the course of the one-and-a-half-minute molding cycle, at a speed too fast for the casual observer to follow. Indeed, you would need three to four human operators if you wanted to replicate the movements in exactly the same way over and over again.