Hanro

Albert Handschin founded Hanro in 1884 as a hand-knitting business in Liestal, near Basel, and the Swiss-born brand now makes underwear, nightwear and loungewear. Its name joins the first syllables of Handschin and his later partner Carl Ronus. Since 1991 it has belonged to the Austrian Huber Group, and today it is run from Götzis in Vorarlberg, with most of its fabric knitted in Austria and its sewing done in Portugal.

Albert Handschin's knitting room in Liestal

The earlier version of this entry had Handschin and Ronus founding the company together and starting with handkerchiefs and scarves. The record says otherwise. Handschin began alone in 1884 with a hand-knitting operation in his own house in Liestal, six women and six machines. Three years later he set up a company health insurance fund, one of the first in Switzerland.

Carl Ronus joined in 1895, and the two formed the partnership Handschin & Ronus, then about 60 employees strong. In 1898 they bought the Benzbur property in Liestal and had a factory there by the following year. By 1906 the payroll had grown to about 160, with roughly 100 more people, mostly women, knitting at home. A second plant opened in Büren, in the canton of Solothurn, in 1911.

At the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, five years after the founding, Handschin received a silver medal from the French ministry of commerce.

The Hanro name and the circular knitting machine

The Hanro trademark, a portmanteau of the two founders' surnames, was registered in 1913. Before the First World War the company made and exported women's underwear, with Britain, the United States and France as its main markets. During the war it switched to military underwear and knitted jackets for soldiers, and in 1919 the partnership became a family-owned public company, Hanro AG.

The company's own history puts its knitting technology at the center: patented circular knitting and wearing comfort defined the early collections. In the 1930s Hanro worked with the Swiss knitting-machine maker Dubied to develop circular knitting machines for outerwear, and from 1936 used them to make fabric for swimsuits, dresses and suits. A 2022 academic study by Leonie Häsler on Hanro's design archive takes seamlessness as the organizing principle of the firm's work from 1884 to 1991, which is a fair summary of what made it distinctive.

Madeleine Handschin and the seamless camisole

The company credits Madeleine Handschin with introducing, in the 1930s, what it calls the world's first seamless bra camisoles, and with taking the collection into beachwear and swimwear. A bra built into a knitted camisole is close kin to today's wireless bra, and Wikipedia's history of the bra names Hanro, along with Hanky Panky, as one of the makers of wire-free bras emerging by the late 1970s.

Bendigo, Italian workers and Hanro's peak

In 1926 Hanro opened an Australian subsidiary: 17 employees moved to Bendigo, Victoria, and started production on machines brought from Switzerland. The subsidiary was sold in the mid-1960s.

After the Second World War demand rose sharply, and from 1947 the company recruited young women from Italy to work in Liestal, a program later cited as a positive example in the history of Swiss labor migration. The workforce grew from 350 in 1946 to 689 in 1958, and in the 1950s Hanro sold in 45 countries. It took over the Murgenthal textile firm HIS & Co. in 1963, opened a subsidiary in Novazzano on the Italian border in 1970, and had about 1,000 employees by 1972.

The brand's place in film comes from these years and after. Marilyn Monroe wore Hanro briefs in the subway-grate scene of The Seven Year Itch in 1955. In the 1960s, the company says, Raschel lace and brighter designs made it an international name.

Cotton Seamless and Eyes Wide Shut

The 1970s were hard. A strong franc, high Swiss wages and export duties squeezed the business, and the Murgenthal operation closed. In the 1980s Hanro concentrated more on daywear and sleepwear, and set up a subsidiary near Dublin in 1980.

The product that defines the modern brand dates from this period. The Cotton Seamless spaghetti-strap top, a fine circular-knit cotton camisole, became what the company calls a cult classic, and it reached a much wider audience when Nicole Kidman wore a white Hanro camisole in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut in 1999. In 2015 Dakota Johnson wore white Hanro cotton briefs in Fifty Shades of Grey.

Huber, Götzis and the end of Swiss production

In 1991 Huber Tricot, the Vorarlberg underwear maker, bought 75 percent of Hanro, which had been run as a family business for three generations; it took the remaining 25 percent two years later. At the time of the deal Hanro employed about 500 people in Liestal, Novazzano and Dublin.

Swiss manufacturing ended in stages. Production in Liestal was phased out between 1997 and 1999, the Dublin plant was sold in 1998, and Novazzano closed in 2002. Since 2004 Hanro's headquarters have been in Götzis, at the seat of the Huber Group. About 80 percent of its textiles are made at Arula, a Huber-owned mill in Mäder, Vorarlberg; sewing is done in Portugal and the warehouse is in Hungary. Huber Holding itself is owned by the Chinese group Benger Brands.

The historical collection went home. In 2015 the canton of Basel-Landschaft received Hanro's textile archive and business records, which are now part of the cantonal collections of Archäologie und Museum Baselland.

The range today

Current collections are sold by fabric family more than by season: Cotton Seamless, Cotton Sensation, Touch Feeling, Ultralight, Woolen Silk and Sea Island cotton among them, with the company adding TENCEL fibers from 2020. Hanro won Designer of the Year at the Salon International de la Lingerie in 2016 and marked its 140th anniversary in 2024 with a collection drawn from its archives. By the company's account its biggest market is now the United States, ahead of Germany and Switzerland.

Last updated October 7, 2026