The good old days
Wisa is the brainchild of Willy Sannemann Sr. who in 1953 began printing the first balloons in the front room of his parents’ home.
A couple of years earlier, Sannemann Sr. had brought the first printed balloons from Germany at the request of the owner of the Enschede shoe shop Bervoets-Vriezelaar. During the post-war years, the father of the current managing director worked as a waiter in Germany, his native country. He bought the printed balloons at the Kölnische Gummifäden Fabrik and then took his merchandise to Enschede in a box on the back of his motor bike.
“At one point my father thought: I can do this kind of printing myself,” says Sannemann Jr., “so we started doing it ourselves. The problem is, you first have to inflate the balloon to be able to print on it. In the beginning this was done with a vacuum cleaner. A clothes peg was fixed to the balloon and then it was passed over a plate. It was the job of us, children, to remove the clothes pegs from the balloons. So every member of the family had a task in the production process.” After several years the clothes peg system was replaced with a bike-wheel system which allowed the air to remain in the balloon for some time, allowing the ink to dry.
Sannemann Sr. quickly realized there were a lot of opportunities in the advertising sector and went to many business conferences to exhibit his products, from the large conferences in Utrecht to the yearly butchers’ conference. Besides balloons, Sannemann Sr. then also offered handmade key chains, lapel pins, and printed piggy banks (a real hit with the butchers!).
Willy Sannemann Jr. to lead production
When his father fell ill, Sannemann Jr. went into the business, at the age of 15. “I never went back to school, even after my father had recovered; I had a real dislike for school. The business was much more exciting.”
Production, which began with 500 balloons a day, grew quickly. After buying industrial space in the adjacent cardboard factory, Wisa was able to operate better. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Sannemann family would recruit women living in the same neighborhood to work part-time in their factory.
But Sannemann soon realized there must be a better and more efficient way to print the balloons than the current bike-wheel method. In Belgium a factory was found that was able to simplify the balloon printing process. A rubber impression (of either artwork or text) on a metal cylinder would paint a negative impression on another rotating rubber roll. This allowed a balloon to be hand-pressed against the second rotating roll to transfer the print to the balloon.
The infamous Electrolux vacuum cleaner was now a thing of the past, and was replaced with a small compressor. A revolutionary development, but the Belgians didn’t patent their invention, so 40 machines were purchased. Two of these so-called ‘hand machines’ were connected together and a “set-up wheel” (inflating and moving the balloons) was placed in front of this to create a balloon print-machine that was able to print a balloon on 2 sides at once, and increase production from 5,000 balloons a day to 100,000. The 20 ladies in the printing department each placed a minimum of 10,000 balloons per day (by hand) on the machine, which automatically inflated the balloon, pressed the balloon against the rotating roll to transfer the printing, and deflated the balloon. The era of the clothes peg and the bike-wheel was definitely over.
In 1976 Willy Sannemann took the lead of the production of WISA. Although the company continued its growth, the space in which it operated did not. WISA needed room to store what it was capable of producing and the family’s house and the neighbor’s yard were already being used. When a truck came to the small Esstraat to deliver goods for WISA, signs were placed on the road to block traffic since all the goods had to be unloaded by hand. In the afternoons the goods had to be picked up again, causing another traffic problem. “At one point we were in the running to get an order from Heineken,” says Sannemann, “but they wanted to first see if our company was “Heineken-worthy”. We were cleaning and polishing for three days. Two weeks later we received a note informing us that they decided not to give us the order!”
