About us

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The roots of our companies reach back to the Free Waldorf School on Lake Constance. After completing his business studies, our managing director and partner Holger Lauterbach worked there from 1980 as a community service worker. It was here that he decided to put his professional life at the service of anthroposophy and to apply his skills in the economic and entrepreneurial field.

At the beginning of 1982 he joined the founding circle of the Rudolf Steiner School in his home town of Hagen in Westphalia. He worked there for more than seven years as managing director.  Even then, he was successfully dealing with the challenges of cost-effective material purchasing for his own and the surrounding Waldorf schools.

The idea of a purchasing association specifically tailored to the needs of Waldorf schools then led to the founding of EIKA Einkaufsgesellschaft für gemeinnützige Einrichtungen mbH ( www.eika.net ) in 1989. Through connections with various anthroposophical institutions in Wuppertal, this city became the home of EIKA.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we also worked intensively for many years for various institutions of the Diakonisches Werk in East Germany. In 2001-2003, EIKA took over the management as general contractor of several nursing homes of the ASB (Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund) in the Ruhr area. In 2002, the company Waldorfsupplies GmbH ( www.Waldorfsupplies.org ) was founded and made itself known worldwide for the first time with its web shop.

From 2005 to 2020, Holger Lauterbach increasingly made Upper Lusatia his adopted home. There, together with his wife Lucia, he runs the Parkstadthotel ( www.Parkstadthotel.de ) and operated the Waldorf school hostel Schloss Niederspree until 2019.

So now the EIKA and Waldorfsupplies have also moved to East Germany in 2008. After 7 years in Görlitz, Dresden has now been the headquarters of EIKA and Waldorfsupplies since 2017.

Both ventures work on the basis of their founding impulse to promote Waldorf education worldwide through low-cost purchasing opportunities. The aim of our work is to enable Waldorf institutions worldwide to use as much of their budget as possible for their educational work and to use as few resources as possible for teaching materials. We achieve this goal through optimised bulk purchasing, modest own margins, lean organisation and thus low own cost structure for the benefit of our customers. As the only Waldorf full-range supplier worldwide, we offer our articles in every country of the world at the same price, which is only increased by freight costs, local taxes and customs duties. In this way, especially the institutions in the poorer countries benefit, which for their part would often have to pay 2-3 times the price as in Germany.

We have been committed to this founding impulse since 1989 and it is also visible in the daily work by Eric Röllig in the 2nd generation of employees and lived out in the 2nd generation of managing directors by Leonard Lauterbach.