125 years of change: pfenning Group introduces a Group logo and makes a historical discovery
Heddesheim, December 14, 2023
The pfenning group, a full-service provider of supply chain solutions, is introducing a new logo called pfenning group and has re-dated the origins of the company’s foundation as part of historical research.
With the aim of being able to support clients even more precisely along the value chain in future, the company has deliberately undergone a strategic change. To this end, numerous acquisitions have been made in recent years, which have led to an increase in the workforce to 7,000 people. At the same time, the expertise in contract and transport logistics as well as in logistics-related sectors such as personnel services, plant security, metal construction, supply chain and mobility solutions has been expanded.
To take account of this development, the management, together with the Corporate Communications & Marketing department, has decided to introduce a group logo. It is visually based on the established pfenning logo and now bears the English word for group, also in small letters, instead of the addition “logistics”. At the same time, a remarkable discovery was made as part of the historical research: the origins of the company date back to 1899, proving that the group of companies is a proud 125 years young.
The research project started around two years ago under the leadership of Yeliz Kavak-Küstner, Head of Corporate Communications & Marketing, who is particularly pleased about the rewriting of history: “Since I joined the company in 2012, I have been trying to put the historical puzzle together in a meaningful way, as I regularly received a wide variety of contemporary testimonies, but I did not receive any satisfactory answers. Now, together with historians from the H.C. Stader history agency in Mannheim, we have not only completed the big picture, but also explored the origins of pfenning.”
The decisive find was in a yellowed archive box in the reading room of the MARCHIVUM in Mannheim. It contained an entry in the “Trade Diary of the City of Viernheim” dated September 16, 1899, which attests to the entry of the dairy business of Martin Faber, the grandfather of the current owner Karl-Martin Pfenning. “The results of this research came as a complete surprise to me. I knew that my maternal grandfather distributed milk in the region, but we had no evidence of an official business registration,” says Karl-Martin Pfenning. Until then, he only knew that his mother Elisabeth had acquired a truck driver’s license at a young age to support her father in the day-to-day business. “The knowledge of our actual founding year, which is around 35 years further back than previously assumed, is an enormous enrichment for the company’s history and for my family alike,” adds Pfenning.
At the age of just 25, the thoroughbred entrepreneur took over his parents’ forwarding company, named after his father Johann Pfenning, and developed it into a crisis-proof, pan-European full-service provider for supply chain solutions.
In its anniversary year 2024, the pfenning group will publish a chronicle documenting the entire family and company history.
You can download the corresponding images from the press release via this link.
About the pfenning group:
The pfenning group is a full-service provider of supply chain solutions for German SMEs from the Rhine-Neckar metropolitan region. Managed by the third and fourth generation of the Pfenning family, the company can look back on 125 years of logistics experience and employs 7,000 people at 110 locations in Germany, Poland, Hungary and Sweden. With a fleet of 1,000 trucks and a total storage area of 1 million m², the company is the strong backbone for its customers’ logistics and is ranked 55th out of 60,000 logistics service providers in Germany in the “Top 100 Logistics” study. Since May 2023, the company has been ranked 18th among 10,000 German family-owned companies with a total turnover of up to 1 billion euros according to “Die Deutsche Wirtschaft”.
The Heddesheim-based group of companies has continuously expanded its product portfolio. State-of-the-art warehousing and transportation solutions are accompanied by a wide range of value-added services, from plant protection and metal construction to real estate development. The pfenning Group is one of Germany’s leading service providers in the nationwide retail supply sector. But other sectors also rely on the expertise of the Heddesheim-based company: several special warehouses have been built and put into operation for the chemical, automotive, FMCG, food and pharmaceutical industries. The company has acquired further know-how through strategic acquisitions in the areas of fashion logistics and e-commerce for consumer and medical technology goods. Solutions are delivered that ensure stable merchandise management cycles, guarantee an excellent price-performance ratio and pave the way for market success.
Four decades of experience form the foundation on which pioneering real estate projects are realized. With the multicube rhein-neckar, pfenning logistics developed an innovative, multi-award-winning multi-user concept in 2012 that offers space for individual forms of use and sustainable requirements. This success story has been continued with the multicube rheinhessen since 2018. Both logistics centers are among the top 10 industrial buildings in Europe to have been awarded DGNB Platinum. Based on this model, pfenning logistics has been building up to 300,000 m² of qualified warehouse capacity in Germany and Europe since 2022.
For short-term requirements, pfenning logistics offers the Europe-wide logistics service concept “WAREhouses+”, which is available at several transportation hubs, including Karlsruhe, Düsseldorf, Rhine-Main and Wroclaw.
The pfenning group’s corporate philosophy is based on responsibility, commitment and trust. These values guide the team in its daily business. The focus is on transparency, openness and honesty – so that individual and pragmatic solutions can be developed efficiently and flexibly.
For further information, please contact Yeliz Kavak-Küstner.
www.pfenning-logistics.com
www.multicube.org
www.lkw-logenplatz.de
Information: This translation was produced using DeepL.
