From the beginning, the mission has been: "igus® solves customer problems!".

igus® was founded in a double garage in Cologne-Mülheim in 1964. "Give me your biggest problem, and I'll solve it." That was the offer Günter Blase used to win over his first customer, Schlafhorst.
 
Today, igus® supplies more than 175,000 customers all over the globe. On average, 4,200 packages are on the way to customers, sent from 13 shipping centres around the world. And we keep asking ourselves constantly: how do we improve technology while reducing costs? In this effort, cooperation with our customers is very important to us. In Germany alone, more than 80 sales engineers are on site every day to solve tribological problems with polymer bearings.
 
Various tasks can often be suitably completed with a dry-tech® product. Tribo-polymer material properties make them useful for many applications. For instance, a bearing allows various types of movement. The injection-moulding process makes manufacturing a complex design cost-efficient, allowing the product to be designed to meet requirements. This is true both of standard products and of parts made specially for a particular customer.
 
A good example of this is tolerance compensation with a clearance-free, pre-loaded iglidur® JVFM bearing:

Solutions result in new ideas and new products.

Continuously reduced coefficient of friction has allowed more and more problems to be solved with iglidur® plain bearings. But igus® customers wanted the advantages of maintenance-free, corrosion-resistant, lightweight dry-tech® bearings for classical ball bearing applications, too. So the igus® engineers developed the new xiros® polymer ball bearing programme.

Customers can also send their product requests directly to igus®. We then put these on the igus® list of future innovations.
 
An example for this is the iglidur® Q2 plain bearing: Customers who also wanted to leverage lubricant-free technology on hydraulic drive applications with extreme loads needed yet another heavy-duty bearing. After two years of difficult development work, igus® rolled out the iglidur® Q2 material and was able to solve a wide range of heavy-duty applications using this material.

145 new products were developed this way throughout 2012.

An additional 136 products will be added in the Spring of 2013. One example of many is the request by an igus® customer for an installation-space optimized sliding door guide. Within only a few weeks, the initial sketch for the solution to the customer's problem was converted into a first drylin® W linear guide. Today, the modular drylin® W linear guide product range is one of the most requested standard products among drylin® linear technology.