SIE & ER

SIE & ER is a German lip-care brand sold exclusively through pharmacies. It consists of a single, tightly focused series, marketed as SIE & ER LipCare, made up of three lip-care sticks: Daily Care, Repair and SUN. The brand belongs to athenstaedt GmbH & Co KG, an owner-managed pharmaceutical company based in Battenberg (Eder), Germany [2].

The name is German for "she & he". According to the company's own brochure, the line suits women and, as the name suggests, men equally well, and it presents SIE & ER as a lip-care series for the whole family. The brand is active, although its public presence is modest: a small product website, a downloadable brochure and a product page on its owner's corporate site.

When SIE & ER was first launched, and by whom, is not publicly known. Neither the brand nor its owner gives a launch year or names the people behind the line. The year 1885, which appears prominently in athenstaedt's history, is the founding year of the parent company, not of the lip-care brand.

It is also unclear whether athenstaedt created SIE & ER itself or took it over from someone else. A 2015 portrait of the company in a local newspaper, the Frankenberger Zeitung, noted that some athenstaedt products had been bought in to broaden the portfolio, without saying which ones [14]. The same article showed a SIE & ER counter display in a staff photograph, but did not discuss the brand in its text.

The earliest dated third-party trace of the brand is a short item in the pharmacy trade journal Deutsche Apotheker Zeitung. In April 2015, the journal's "Apotheke und Markt" section ran a piece headlined "Sie & Er® Lippenpflegestift 'Sun'" on the SUN stick [13].

SIE & ER is a product of athenstaedt GmbH & Co KG, a statement made directly in the brand website's legal notice [2]. The legal notice names Thorsten Sponholz as managing director and lists a second entity, athenstaedt group gmbh, registered in Marburg.

athenstaedt is considerably older than the brand. Its history begins in 1885, when Julius Athenstaedt and William Redeker founded Athenstaedt & Redeker in Bremen as a manufacturer of chemicals [11]. By 1920 the firm was developing and producing its own medicines as well as chemicals, and from 1970 it also made medicines and chemicals under contract for other companies.

Control of the business later passed out of the founding family. In 1988, Eike W. Kerstein took over the Athenstaedt family's shares, and in 1997 his daughter, Stefanie E. Sponholz, succeeded him. Thorsten Sponholz joined the company in 2001. The firm moved its headquarters several times over this period: to Munich in 1999, to Wolfratshausen in 2008 and to Battenberg (Eder) in 2014. It marked its 125th anniversary in 2010. In 2026, Stefanie E. Sponholz handed athenstaedt over to Inken M. Sponholz, described by the company as the next generation [11].

The company describes itself as owner-managed and says it intends to keep growing steadily over the long term while remaining independent of larger corporate groups [10]. Its range today spans self-medication drugs, pharmacy-exclusive health-care products and fine chemicals sold to the pharmaceutical industry. Within its skin-health portfolio, SIE & ER sits alongside traditional pharmacy preparations such as Alsol, Lenicet and Peru-Lenicet, which are also presented on the lip-care brand's website.

athenstaedt runs what it calls a "virtual" company structure. It regards marketing and sales as its core skills and outsources other functions to specialist service providers [10]. The 1999 move to Munich coincided with the end of its own contract manufacturing. According to the 2015 newspaper portrait, development, production, storage and shipping were all handed to outside partners, with contract manufacturers at eight sites, six of them in Germany, producing for the company [14]. Where SIE & ER itself is made is not publicly stated.

SIE & ER is built around one idea: a single lip-care series meant to cover all common lip problems for everyone in a household, regardless of age or gender. Its tagline, "Lippenpflege für die ganze Familie – natürlich nur aus der Apotheke", translates as "lip care for the whole family – naturally, only from the pharmacy".

The pharmacy channel is central to how the brand presents itself. Its website argues that good lip care is best bought at a trusted pharmacy, where staff can explain ingredients and suggest the right product for a particular problem. The brochure goes further, saying pharmacy staff can advise on how often to apply lip care, on possibly questionable ingredients in some lip products, and on possible causes of dry, chapped lips such as mineral or vitamin deficiencies.

On price and quality, the brand pitches itself in two directions at once. The product website promises "exclusive quality at attractive prices", while athenstaedt's own product page calls SIE & ER a premium lip-care series. In practice it is a pharmacy-exclusive line rather than a prestige brand.

The range is deliberately narrow. According to the brand, SIE & ER LipCare is designed solely for lip care and offers three variants intended to complement each other. Each comes as a 4.8 g stick, and the owner lists a pack size of ten sticks.

Daily Care is the everyday product. The company describes it as care for regular use, built on a combination of dexpanthenol and vitamin E, and says it cares for, regenerates and protects the lips.

Repair is aimed at dry, cracked lips. Its main active is bisabolol, which the brand describes as the concentrated active ingredient of chamomile; the published ingredient list also includes chamomile flower extract and allantoin. The brand goes further than most cosmetic claims here, stating that bisabolol speeds up wound healing and also has an antimicrobial effect [7]. No study or test method is cited in support.

SUN combines lip care with sun protection. The brand calls it extra-strong protection with sun protection factor 30, using UVA and UVB filters [8]. According to the product page, the formula uses only plant oils, contains no mineral oils and keeps the lips soft for a long time without needing frequent reapplication. As with Repair, no test method is named for the SPF claim. The owner's product page still introduces SUN as new.

The published ingredient lists show that the line is not fragrance-free: Daily Care and Repair contain ethyl vanillin, and SUN lists aroma and limonene.

SIE & ER's website states that its lip-care sticks are made without colourants, animal ingredients or petroleum products [1]. The ingredient lists published by athenstaedt give a more mixed picture. The lists for Daily Care and Repair include cera alba, which is beeswax and therefore animal-derived, alongside synthetic beeswax [12]. The SUN list contains no cera alba. The claim of containing no animal ingredients therefore does not match the published formulas for two of the three products, and no vegan claim is made for the line.

The absence of mineral oil is better supported. The SUN product page states specifically that the stick contains no mineral oils, and none of the three published ingredient lists includes petrolatum or paraffin.

No third-party certifications are documented for the brand. At company level, athenstaedt says it is committed to sustainability in its economic, ecological and social dimensions [10]. No commitment specific to SIE & ER has been published.

SIE & ER is active. The brand website is live, and athenstaedt continues to list SIE & ER LipCare among its current pharmacy products. The brand's downloadable brochure dates from June 2024. No brand-specific news or launches have appeared in the last year, and the brand website links to no social-media accounts.

The brand's communication is in German. athenstaedt names Germany as its home market and says its pharmaceutical products are also sold across Europe and in North America, but it does not specify whether this applies to SIE & ER.