Stern

Stern is a family-run hairdressing-trade supplier based in Bremen, Germany. Its core business is professional wig-making and barbering supplies — floor stands, tools and materials for wigmakers, practice hairpieces for trade examinations — with a small beard-care line whose Hungarian moustache wax has become its best-known consumer product. The company trades under the legal name STERN Haar - Atelier und Friseurbedarf Stefan Matthies OHG and is registered at the district court of Bremen under HRA 18772, with Stefan Matthies as managing director.

The business is described on its own website as a fourth-generation family firm. It remains an active legal entity and its products continue to be sold through third-party retailers, but its digital presence has been largely frozen since 2015 and its own webshop is no longer online — so it is best understood as an active but digitally dormant trade supplier.

⚑ Thinner sourcing. The article relies largely on the brand's own statements (T2–T3). Glowpedia is seeking independent sources.

Stern presents itself as a fourth-generation family business. The clearest statement of this appears in the description text on its website: "STERN Bremen: seit 93 Jahren Familienbetrieb (4.Generation)" — a family business for 93 years, in the fourth generation [1]. Because that page carries no fixed reference year, the founding date cannot be pinned down: measured against the site's last documented update in October 2015, "93 years" implies a founding around 1922 [1].

Other sources give different figures. The English-language grooming reseller goelds.com states that the company has been producing its beard wax "since 1906," describing "over 100 years of experience" [13]; a European business directory records 2003, which most likely reflects the registration of the current general-partnership legal form rather than the founding of the family business. Stern's own site offers no verbatim founding year, and the figures cannot be reconciled from the available records, so the founding date is treated here as unresolved.

What is documented is the firm's long web presence and its recent inactivity online. The English page carries a copyright line reading "© STERN Haar-Atelier 1999," and the homepage was last updated on 15 October 2015. The commercial-register aggregator North Data lists general-partner changes recorded in October 2005 and January 2016 [17].

Stern's assortment is overwhelmingly professional. Its catalogue lists floor stands, stainless-steel head-holders, knotting and tressing frames, ventilating needles, toupee adhesives, gauze and tulle, and both real and synthetic hair — the full material inventory of the wig-making and hairpiece trade. A distinct sub-segment serves vocational training: practice hairpieces, exam materials and worked exercises aimed at apprentices preparing for the German hairdresser's journeyman examination, in which techniques such as tressing and knotting are practical components.

Its stainless-steel tools carry a stated thirty-year guarantee, which the company frames in generational terms — its about page remarks that only the customer's grandchildren will be able to judge how well the head-holders and floor-stands hold up [3].

The brand's most widely distributed consumer product is the Ungarische Bartwichse, a Hungarian moustache wax sold as a colourless 13-gram tube (article 378). It is described as holding all day and washing out with water, and its stated ingredients are a simple, traditional formula of water, beeswax (Cera Alba) and gum arabic (Acacia Senegal) [14]; one German reseller additionally lists the preservative propylparaben [15]. The wax anchors a small beard-care line that also includes a moustache binding, a comb, a brush and a boxed grooming set. One reseller markets the wax with a "vegan" label, but the presence of beeswax in the ingredient list makes that description unreliable, and the company itself makes no vegan claim [13].

Stern positions itself around quality, durability and family continuity. Its tagline is "der Qualität wegen" — roughly, "for the sake of quality" — and its self-description casts the firm as a specialist supplier to the wholesale and retail hairdressing trade, "fast, competent and friendly." The business also publishes short instructional guides to classic hairpiece crafts such as tressing and knotting, presenting itself as an educational resource for the trade rather than a consumer marketing operation.

The customer base reflects this. A German B2B directory classifies Stern as a worldwide-delivering wholesaler with 10 to 19 staff and notes that it also supplies carnival and theatre wigs and beards alongside the hairdressing trade [16]. Its manufacturing is stated to be in Germany [13].

Stern's site historically pointed international visitors to local partners: its Swedish-language page is a referral to the Gothenburg distributor Göteborgs Perukmakeri, the only Nordic partner named directly. The site's keyword metadata targets the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish terms for beard wax, indicating an intended Nordic reach. In practice, the moustache wax reaches the wider market — including Nordic catalogues — chiefly through independent men's-grooming and barber-supply resellers that ship across borders, rather than through Stern directly.

Stern remains an active, registered company. The legal entity is current at the district court of Bremen (HRA 18772) [5], the physical Bremen premises are listed as open in recent directory entries, and the Hungarian moustache wax continues to be sold by multiple third-party retailers into 2025 and 2026 [15].

Its digital footprint, however, has stalled. The company's own website has not been substantively updated since October 2015 [1], and the first-party webshop subdomain no longer resolves, leaving the brand without a working direct e-commerce channel. It is therefore accurately described as active but digitally dormant: a small fourth-generation Bremen trade supplier whose sales now flow mainly through wholesale and third-party resellers.