Between laboratory and industry

Dr. Reichelt, your company has been in existence for around 48 years with a large product portfolio for numerous areas of application. How has your product range developed to date?

Founded as a sales and production company in Heidelberg in 1978, I saw the company as a "mail order house". Reichelt Chemietechnik now has a very broad customer base in the fields of chemical engineering, pharmaceutical engineering, biotechnology, process technology, mechanical engineering, construction technology and electronics, with laboratory technology playing a role that should not be underestimated.

The market is now served with 80,000 articles. The range includes hoses, hose connectors, taps and valves made from all elastomers and plastics, as well as plates, tubes, rods and films made from special fluoroelastomers and fluoroplastics. The filtration range includes filter membranes, screen mesh, sintered plates and sintered tubes as well as yarn-wound filter elements and filter cartridges for aggressive media. The construction technology range includes spacers, adhesives and O-rings.
O-rings, while drive technology also plays an important role.

With such a large range of different products, it is certainly a challenge to make them known to a correspondingly wide circle of users. What strategy do you have to draw attention to your product range?

Reichelt Chemietechnik publishes 3.4 million manuals every year. The small catalogs are included in 14 trade journals every month, ensuring high visibility and presenting the entire product range at the same time. Details of all products can be looked up in the manuals and on our homepage. After ordering via the practical shopping cart function on our homepage, the desired products are delivered immediately.

In addition, we would like to offer specialists and users of our products added value with interesting information. The Reichelt Chemietechnik website therefore includes a science blog. This is where specialist articles written by external scientists on current topics are published on a weekly basis. This form of search engine optimization (SEO) ensures that Reichelt Chemietechnik achieves optimal rankings on Google and thus ensures that our products are easy to find.

What concept do you have for the distribution of your products?

The sales concept is based on supplying small quantities. For example, we supply hose sections of 3, 9 and 15 m, i.e. units that are needed at the workplace, thus avoiding stockholding on the part of the user. We keep 70% of all products in stock at all times so that we can deliver just in time.

With regard to laboratory supplies: What changes have there been in your company or product range over the years due to changes in the market and in laboratories?

We started with a small program for the biochemistry market segment. Our product portfolio was primarily aimed at research in industry and education. Our range included fraction collectors, UV detectors, chromatography columns made of glass and acrylic glass as well as the corresponding pumps and valves. Over the years, analytical methods in this field have changed considerably, so that medium-pressure liquid chromatography has largely been replaced by high-pressure liquid chromatography. For this reason, we had to abandon our own production program.

We found new product lines in the expansion of our fluid technology range with the Thomafluid trademark, in filtration technology with the Thomapor trademark and in plastics technology with the Thomaplast trademark. We also serve the drive technology market segment with the new Thomadrive product group. Today, all four product groups are our sales drivers, which, as already reported, are offered by us with 80,000 articles and reach the market with 3.4 million manuals, i.e. catalogs, every year.