A history of Kitchener-Waterloo manufacturing

JointWerks is based in St. Jacobs, just north of Waterloo, in a region with a long habit of making things. To understand why so many manufacturers and engineers are here today, it helps to go back about 150 years.

A town built by makers

In the 1800s the area was settled largely by Pennsylvania German Mennonites and immigrants from the German states. The town that grew up around them was named Berlin in 1833, and it brought a strong craft tradition with it: practical people who valued skilled work, thrift and building things to last.

That culture turned into industry. In 1866 Emil Vogelsang, a German immigrant, began making buttons with merchant Henry Huber, and button factories grew until Berlin was known as “Buttonville”, with more than a thousand people working in them. Furniture, leather, rubber and food followed. Berlin businessmen started the Berlin Rubber Manufacturing Company, and the Dominion Tire plant later became Uniroyal and, today, AirBoss Rubber Compounding.

From Berlin to Kitchener

During the First World War, anti-German feeling and pressure from local business leaders led to a referendum in June 1916, and on 1 September 1916 Berlin became Kitchener. The name changed; the manufacturing culture did not.

Companies that grew up here

Over the generations, Kitchener-Waterloo and the surrounding Waterloo Region produced or hosted companies known around the world:

• Seagram’s. The Waterloo distillery dates to 1857. Joseph E. Seagram became its sole owner in 1883, and the company he built became one of the largest distillers in the world.
• Schneiders. J.M. Schneider was making sausages full time in Berlin by 1890. The brand is now part of Maple Leaf Foods.
• Dare Foods. Charles Doerr opened a grocery in Berlin in 1889 and was soon baking biscuits; the company is still headquartered in Kitchener.
• BlackBerry. Founded in Waterloo in 1984 as Research In Motion by Mike Lazaridis, then a University of Waterloo student, and Douglas Fregin.
• ATS. Founded in 1978 by Klaus Woerner and now headquartered in Cambridge, ATS builds automated manufacturing systems for customers around the world.
• Eclipse Automation. A Cambridge builder of custom automation and robotics, acquired by Accenture in 2022.

Toyota added to that story in 1988, when the first Corolla came off the line at its new Cambridge plant.

The engineering engine

In 1957 a new engineering school opened in Waterloo with 74 students and a radical idea: alternate classroom terms with paid work terms in industry. That school became the University of Waterloo, and its co-op program now places more than 25,000 students a year with thousands of employers. Conestoga College, founded in Kitchener in 1967, trains the technologists, technicians and tradespeople who turn designs into parts.

Put a craft culture, a dense base of manufacturers and two schools feeding them talent in the same place, and you get what Waterloo Region is today: one of Canada’s strongest clusters of manufacturing and engineering.

The next chapter

We see ourselves as part of that story: a modern shop that pairs the region’s craftsmanship with software that connects customers directly to the work. Proudly made in Canada, and delivered wherever you need it.

Have a part that needs making? Send us your drawing.