Company Profile

In the early 1950s Carl Strutz Sr., a German immigrant, and his two sons, Frank and Carl Jr., began operation of a small machine shop near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They provided customers with job shop machining and custom assembly services. The company incorporated in 1953 as Strutz Fabricators, Inc.

Their involvement in the glass industry began when a local glass factory contracted them to build a special machine to print labels on glass beverage bottles. The collaboration yielded the first STRUTZ glass decorating machine. It was a semi-automatic screen decorator, requiring the operator to manually load a glass container onto the machine. Labels were transferred onto the container's surface through an ink filled screen tray bearing a graphic design. Image quality depended on how well the label design could be transferred onto the glass container without smearing or smudging, and with good color-to-color registration. Sharp images depended on precise synchronization between the glass container and the screen. This remains the key to the high quality images that STRUTZ machines produce today.

In the early 1960s, Strutz Fabricators developed the CS100, the first STRUTZ automatic glass decorator. It operated with other machines in a glass factory using a system of interconnected conveyors. Glass bottles were loaded onto the automatic decorating machine from a conveyor, screen decorated in multiple colors, and then unloaded onto another conveyor. Speeds exceeding 100 bottles per minute could be achieved using this process.

Over the decades that followed, Strutz built machines for nearly every corner of the container decorating world: tumbler decorators, closure printers, industrial pail decorators, and an improved version of the original semi-automatic decorator that revolutionized the glass industry in the company's early days. Many of those machines are still in service today, and their stories are preserved in our product history.

Today's STRUTZ glass decorators operate at speeds up to 200 bottles per minute and decorate bottles in four colors with excellent color-to-color registration. The level of performance and quality found in our decorators is not available on any other glass decorator product in the world. We also offer our non-contact optical registration system, lehr loading stackers, single liners, and electronic color dispensing systems.

Today, Strutz International, Inc. is still owned and operated by members of the Strutz family. Our decorators are machined and assembled by experienced craftsmen as they were over 50 years ago. We continue to progress as the world leaders in the glass decorating industry through our commitment to our customers and by the quality of our machines.