Hemmerle

Anton and Joseph Hemmerle established Hemmerle by taking over the established goldsmiths’ company Elchinger that produced medals and orders. In 1895, they were appointed 'Purveyor to the Court' by Luitpold, Prince Regent of Bavaria through a royal warrant of appointment to create medals for the Royal Bavarian Court, including the historic Bavarian Order of Merit, which Hemmerle continues to produce to this day since it was instituted in 1957. Hemmerle has also been responsible for producing the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art since 1905.

The Hemmerle boutique at 14 Maximilianstraße opened in 1904 and remained there for more than a century.

During the early 1990s, Stefan Hemmerle began experimenting with jewellery that departed from traditional precious-metal settings, a development influenced in part by client preferences and historical iron jewellery. In 1995, he designed a ring for the wife of an art collector, in response to her practice of wearing Berlin iron jewellery (which Germans received in exchange for donating their gold and silver jewels toward funding the War of Liberation). He set a diamond in textured iron rather than in gold or platinum. The combination of common metal with a precious stone was considered unusual at the time. This marked a shift in the workshop’s design direction. In 1995, the workshop expanded its production of contemporary jewellery design, introducing new material combinations and larger sculptural forms. In the mid-1990s, the workshop increasingly introduced materials such as iron, brass, copper, aluminium and wood into its jewellery production.

The company began presenting jewellery in the United States in the late 1990s through exhibitions and private viewing appointments in Palm Beach, Florida, and New York and from 2006 onwards, through temporary showrooms and private presentations in cities including New York, Hong Kong and Singapore. Since the 2010s, Hemmerle has presented jewellery at international art and design fairs including TEFAF Maastricht (since 1997), TEFAF New York (since 2016) and PAD London.

In 2024, Hemmerle relocated its Munich premises from Maximilianstraße 14 to a new space at Maximilianstraße 30, marking the first major change of location after more than a century at the original address. Through this relocation, the company replaced its previous ground-floor boutique with a new upstairs salon.