Edelrid

Edelrid was founded on 13 June 1863 as Schachenmayer & Cie, a braid and cord factory, in Isny im Allgäu — a small town in southern Germany, where the company still is a hundred and sixty years later.

The name comes from two of the founders, Edelmann and Ridder, contracted and trademarked as EDELRID in 1962. Wilhelm Schachenmayer, Carl Ridder and Julius Edelmann started it during the American Civil War, decades before anybody was climbing on anything you’d recognize as a modern rope.

Which brings us to the reason this page exists.

They invented the rope

In 1953, Edelrid produced the first marketable kernmantle rope for mountain sports.

Kernmantle means a load-bearing core inside a protective braided sheath — core and mantle, doing separate jobs. Before it, climbers used laid rope, which abraded, kinked, and had a habit of failing over edges. After it, the whole discipline changed, because for the first time the rope was reliably stronger than the situation.

Look at anything on this site. Sterling’s HTP. Petzl’s AXIS. Every static line in every rope access kit in the world. All of it is kernmantle construction. Edelrid did that, and then let the entire industry follow them into it.

And they kept going

The 1953 rope would be enough for most companies. Edelrid’s list carries on:

• 1962 — Carl Benk develops and patents the bi-color rope, so you can see the middle mark. Every rope with a color change owes this one.
• 1964 — the first energy rope, the multi-fall rope, which is the ancestor of every dynamic rope rated for repeated falls.
• 1973 — the first sewn quickdraw sling.
• 2009 — the first rope manufacturer in the world to meet the bluesign environmental standard, which audits chemical inputs across the entire production chain rather than just testing the finished product.
• 2016 — the OHM, a resistor that lets a light belayer safely hold a much heavier climber. Nobody asked for it. It solved a real problem anyway.

That is a company with a habit.

What they bring to a professional kit

Ropes. Statics, dynamics, canyoning lines, and — the interesting one — INTERSTATIC PROTECT, a cut-resistant static for work over edges that would destroy a normal rope. Steelwork, glass, sheet metal, anything with a manufactured edge.

Connectors. The Bulletproof range sets a steel insert into an alloy carabiner at exactly the point that wears through. You get aluminum weight with steel life. It is the kind of idea that seems obvious only afterwards.

Fall protection and rope access. MEGAWATT descenders, the FUSE guided-type fall arrester, VERTIC harnesses, SWITCH PRO lanyards — a complete professional system rather than a rope company’s side range.

Work comfort. The AIR LOUNGE work seat. Sitting in a harness for eight hours is its own engineering problem and most brands ignore it.

Adventure parks and route construction. Smart belay systems for a sector almost nobody else on our roster serves.

Why we rate them

The longest memory in the business. A hundred and sixty years of making rope means institutional knowledge nobody can buy or shortcut.

They innovate where it counts. Kernmantle. Bi-color. Multi-fall. Sewn quickdraws. Bluesign. Each one became an industry default, which is the strongest form of influence a manufacturer can have.

They took sustainability first, not late. Being the first rope maker to clear bluesign in 2009 — auditing what goes into the process, not just what comes out — was well ahead of the industry.

More on the Bulletproof in the journal: the failure mode nobody inspects for — why a worn carabiner threatens the rope before it threatens itself, and where the steel insert earns its money.

When we reach for European rope or full professional PPE, we reach for Edelrid.