Christian Oswald

Christian Oswald is a German brand of single-ingredient animal fats and conifer oils, produced by Christian Oswald Import-Export GmbH, a family company based in Ebersberg in Upper Bavaria. The business was founded in 1975 as a limited partnership (KG) and has since become a GmbH [1]. Its consumer range centres on marmot oil, deer tallow and badger fat, which are sold for application on the skin, alongside essential oils distilled from spruce and pine needles.

The brand sits at an unusual edge of personal care. Its products are closer to traditional body and joint rubs than to conventional cosmetics, and one online pharmacy files its marmot oil under muscles, bones and joints rather than under skincare [8]. The company carries the name of Christian Oswald (1930–2011), a Bavarian game trader whose career in the venison and antler trade shaped the firm's origins. Since 2003 the business has been run by the second generation of the family.

The company's own history page is, in effect, a biography of its namesake. Christian Oswald was born on 21 September 1930 and died on 22 July 2011 [2]. According to that account, he grew up around farming, milling and the food trade, and began trading and processing game in 1954.

In 1960 he moved to a meat wholesaler in Munich, where he built up a game-processing operation. The company says this unit eventually employed 50 butchers and packers and handled around 1,000 tonnes of game a year. A small share was sold through the Zerwirkgewölbe, described on the site as the oldest game shop in Bavaria; the building dates from 1264 and served as Munich's first Hofbräuhaus until 1733. In the same period Oswald expanded imports of game from Austria, the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, the former Czechoslovakia, Poland, New Zealand and Argentina.

The firm itself was established in 1975. No page names the people who formed the original partnership, so who exactly founded it is not documented. What the company does say is that "the Oswald family" built up, over the following decades, a worldwide distribution network, dealing mainly in the wholesale and manufacture of natural products of animal and plant origin.

Alongside the business, Christian Oswald pursued a long personal interest in deer. The history page describes more than half a century spent on hunting, the venison market and the trade in shed antlers from nearly every deer species, with a particular fascination for the many forms of red deer found around the world.

That interest took him far afield. In 1967 he visited an international hunting exhibition in Novi Sad, then in Yugoslavia, where a Mongolian pavilion with a yurt and large argali, ibex and maral trophies caught his attention. His first journey around the world followed in 1971, taking him through Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Manila and Jakarta to Australia and New Zealand. In 1981, on a business trip to Xi'an, he met the German-speaking wildlife biologist Dr. Guo Fang Zheng, whom the company credits with teaching him about China's wild animals.

Between 1971 and 2005 Oswald made numerous expeditions with Mongolian, Russian and Chinese companions. The site singles out a 1986 hunt for MacNeill's deer and white-lipped deer at around 5,000 metres in Qinghai, on the eastern Tibetan plateau, as the most demanding and dangerous of them.

He set out his views in a book, Das Rotwild der Erde ("The Red Deer of the World"). The company presents it not as a scientific work but as a personal view of the evolution, distribution and features of the different deer forms. According to the same page, a central concern of the book was a critical look at how humans treat these animals, with habitat destruction, poaching, trophy hunting, captive breeding and genetic manipulation named as threats.

His private collection of antlers and skulls, which covered the deer species of the world, was delivered to the Milu Park in Beijing in 2011, the year of his death. It has been on display at the park's Milu Ecological Research Center since 2015 [2].

Within the company, the generational change came earlier. Christoph Karl Brenninger has worked in the family business since 1989, and since 2003 he and Astrid Brenninger have led it as the second generation [1].

Christian Oswald Import-Export GmbH is a family-owned company with no documented parent group. It is entered in the commercial register in Munich, and its managing directors are Astrid and Christoph Brenninger [5]. No acquisitions or sister brands are recorded.

The Bavarian state export-promotion database lists the company as a distributor, with activities spanning essential oils, oils and fats, and slaughtering and meat processing [9]. This places the Christian Oswald name within a broader trading business rather than a standalone cosmetics house.

Christian Oswald frames its range around purity and minimal processing. The company says it guarantees "100% naturrein" (pure and natural) quality, tested and continuously monitored by an accredited testing laboratory, and that analysis certificates are available on request [3]. Its online shop adds that all products are left in their natural state, with no additives or fragrances. As a result, the company notes, the animal fats keep their characteristic animal smell.

Animal welfare and species protection are addressed directly. According to the company, the badger and marmot fats come from animals killed in the course of regular hunting, not for the production of the fats; it describes its products as using an animal by-product that would otherwise go to waste [7]. The firm also states that its trade in and manufacture of animal products involves only species not listed on the red list of CITES, the international convention on trade in endangered species [1].

For the conifer oils, the company describes itself as familiar with the whole process, from protecting the tree stock through controlled harvesting to distillation and quality checks.

Sales follow two routes. The corporate product page states that the company supplies commercial wholesale buyers in Germany and abroad and cannot accept requests from private individuals [3]. Consumer sales run separately, through a Christian Oswald online shop and through online pharmacies, where the company appears as the manufacturer of its marmot oil [8].

The range is short and built around single ingredients. The animal fats include:

- Murmeltieröl ORIGINAL – marmot oil, obtained from the fat that marmots build up in summer as a store for winter. - Marmotol® – the same marmot oil, deodorised and bleached to soften its smell. The company says it still consists of 100% marmot oil with no additives, and sells it in glass bottles and as a roll-on. - Hirschtalg – deer tallow, made from the rendered body fat of red deer, also offered as a stick (Hirschtalgstift). - Dachsfett – badger fat, which the company sources from Switzerland and Austria. - Rindertalg – beef tallow.

The plant side of the range consists of essential oils: Siberian and Chinese spruce needle oil, dwarf mountain pine oil and Swiss stone pine oil. Deer antler (Hirschhorn) also appears as a product category on the corporate site.

All of these are positioned for external use. The company's FAQ notes that in some other cultures badger fat is also taken by mouth, but says it sells its own badger fat for use on the skin only, and that oral use falls outside its recommendation. It also advises testing a product on a small patch of skin before use, and says side effects are not generally expected unless a relevant allergy exists.

Marmotol is a registered product name. The online shop has announced a new 50 ml Marmotol roll-on.

No third-party certifications, clinical studies or patents are documented for the brand.

Christian Oswald is active. Its corporate website and online shop were both live in October 2026, with the shop welcoming visitors to a newly launched webshop and promoting the new Marmotol roll-on [6]. Its marmot oil is listed by the online pharmacy Shop Apotheke. The company remains a second-generation family business in Ebersberg, run by Astrid and Christoph Brenninger.