Der Schirmmacher Rolf Lippke makes umbrellas to order, continuing a family trade that began with umbrella repairs in North Bohemia in 1882. Kyoto's Hiyoshiya works in oiled paper and bamboo, carrying the traditional kyo-wagasa umbrella into its present production. James Smith & Sons sells umbrellas from its New Oxford Street shopfront, with an in-house repair department supporting the London business.
What makes great umbrella makers?
This plate lists 27 shops in 14 countries. London has the most, with 4.
Ask how the frame is made: ask about the number of ribs and the material of the shaft, since those parts take the wind.
Ask about repairs: a shop that replaces ribs and canopies can keep one umbrella in use for many years.
Ask how it travels: check the closed length before buying if the umbrella has to fit in luggage or a cabin bag.
Explore umbrella makers
Use the city plates when they appear below, or open any store for its official door and related ORBIS city and craft links.
Hiyoshiya has made kyo-wagasa, Kyoto's traditional oiled-paper-and-bamboo umbrella, since the late Edo period — over 160 years — and describes itself as the only Kyoto workshop still carrying the technique through five unbroken generations.
Best for Kyo-wagasa umbrellas and bamboo-and-washi lighting
Hiyoshiya has made kyo-wagasa, Kyoto's traditional oiled-paper-and-bamboo umbrella, since the late Edo period — over 160 years — and describes itself as the only Kyoto workshop still carrying the technique through five unbroken generations. The umbrellas are built the old way: split bamboo ribs, a wooden hub, and washi paper stretched and oiled by hand, a construction largely unchanged since the craft was passed down.
What distinguishes Hiyoshiya from a purely preservationist workshop is what it has done since Kotaro Nishibori took over as president in 2003 under the stated philosophy that tradition survives by continuing to innovate. Rather than keep the wagasa structure confined to umbrellas, Hiyoshiya adapted its ribbed bamboo-and-washi form into a line of interior lighting, using the same folding skeleton and paper diffusion that make a wagasa canopy glow when backlit. That reinvention grew the business well beyond a single craft shop, into consulting, education and a network connecting artisans internationally, while the original Kyoto workshop still turns out hand-built wagasa and teaches visitors the dohari paper-pasting step in short courses.
For a craft with a shrinking number of working hands, Hiyoshiya is a rare case of a centuries-old technique staying commercially alive by finding a second object to live in.
Trading from its largely unaltered Victorian shopfront at 53 New Oxford Street since 1857 (founded 1830), James Smith & Sons is generally credited as London's oldest umbrella shop, with its own in-house repair department.
Best for London's oldest umbrella shop - an almost unaltered 1857 Victorian shopfront
James Smith founded this umbrella business in 1830 at Foubert's Place in Soho; his son later moved the main shop to 53 New Oxford Street in 1857, where it has traded ever since - long enough that it is generally credited as London's oldest umbrella shop. The New Oxford Street premises is largely unaltered: a mahogany, painted-glass and brass Victorian shopfront, with fittings inside dating to around the 1870s and polished wooden counters that have stayed in place through more than a century of trade, making the interior itself as much a draw as anything sold within it. The current range covers gentlemen's and ladies' umbrellas across several traditional constructions - solid stick, fit-up, pencil and birdcage models - plus walking sticks in country, town, ladies' and folding styles, seatsticks, and accessories finished in natural horn. Crucially, the shop maintains an in-house repair department that services the umbrellas and sticks it has made, rather than treating repair as an afterthought bolted onto retail. Locally, London cab drivers are said to know it simply as 'the umbrella shop,' a nickname that reflects how embedded the address has become in the city's daily geography near the British Museum. It functions as a working shop first, with the Victorian shopfront surviving as a byproduct of nearly two centuries of continuous trade rather than a restoration project.
Tsujikura traces back to 1690, when Yamashiro-ya Jinshichi began making and selling umbrellas in Kyoto; the shop is now in its 17th generation and describes itself as Japan's oldest working wagasa maker.
Best for Hand-built wagasa from Japan's oldest umbrella house
Tsujikura traces back to 1690, when Yamashiro-ya Jinshichi began making and selling umbrellas in Kyoto; the shop is now in its 17th generation and describes itself as Japan's oldest working wagasa maker. Each umbrella is built by hand through more than 100 separate production steps, using domestically sourced bamboo for the ribs and hub, wood, and washi paper treated with vegetable oil for the canopy — materials and a process the shop says have stayed essentially fixed for roughly 300 years.
The business has adapted around the edges without changing the core craft: the 13th generation added traditional lanterns to the workshop's output around 1920, and in 2011 the shop moved into the seventh floor of the Tsujikura Building in Kyoto's Nakagyō ward after its previous premises deteriorated. The umbrellas themselves have drawn outside recognition over the decades, including coverage in Vogue and a 1985 feature in the New York Times.
For a craft that depends on a small and aging pool of bamboo splitters, paper-pasters and oil-finishers, a 17-generation family workshop still running the full hand process — rather than a shop reselling wagasa made elsewhere — is now a rarer thing in Kyoto than the umbrella's long history might suggest.
Founded in 1823 on Calle del Carmen and trading from Madrid's Puerta del Sol since the mid-19th century, Casa de Diego hand-crafts fans, parasols, umbrellas, mantillas and shawls; only about 1% of its full inventory is listed online.
Best for Madrid fans, umbrellas, parasols and walking sticks
Francesco Maglia has been stewarded by the same family since 1854, when the first Francesco Maglia began making umbrellas by hand; the business moved to Milan in 1876 and today works from a small workshop at Corso Genova 7, now run by the sixth generation.
Best for One-piece solid-stick umbrellas hand-finished through roughly 70 steps
Francesco Maglia has been stewarded by the same family since 1854, when the first Francesco Maglia began making umbrellas by hand; the business moved to Milan in 1876 and today works from a small workshop at Corso Genova 7, now run by the sixth generation. Around 1900 Milan had roughly 100 umbrella makers; Maglia is one of the last still doing it entirely by hand, and rival houses reportedly buy component parts from them rather than the reverse.
Every umbrella passes through about 70 production steps. The house's signature is the solid-stick umbrella, in which handle and shaft are cut from a single piece of wood — walnut, hickory, chestnut, rosewood, ebony, and a dozen other species are all in use — with the handle tied to the stick during finishing to hold its round shape. Canopies are a custom Jacquard blend of cotton, silk and wool with a Teflon coating; the crown is milled brass produced in-house, the slider cast iron.
Maglia's ready-made pieces have sold through Barneys New York, Bergdorf Goodman, Paul Stuart, Gucci and Loewe, but the workshop itself remains what it was in 1854: a handful of craftspeople finishing every stick and rib by hand in one Milan address.
Naples umbrella house since 1860, hand-bending single lengths of chestnut, bamboo or Malacca cane under steam and sewing silk canopies by hand; supplied Bourbon-Two Sicilies royalty and, more recently, King Charles III.
Best for Naples umbrella house since 1860, hand-bending single lengths of chestnut
Mario Talarico's workshop, tucked on Vico Due Porte a Toledo just off Naples' Via Toledo, has made umbrellas by hand since 1860, one of Naples' oldest surviving artisan houses. Each cane runs the full length of the umbrella as a single, unbroken piece of wood - chestnut, bamboo, beech, cherry or Malacca - bent under steam into a curve of at least 180 degrees rather than jointed from separate parts, the technique that gives a Talarico umbrella its identifying silhouette. Canopies are cut and sewn by hand from silk or cotton, and handles are finished individually: a rustic chestnut 'root' handle keeps its natural bark at the knob while the shaft beneath is shaved down for a slimmer furled profile. The shop has carried royal custom across two eras - historically supplying the Bourbon-Two Sicilies court, and more recently making the first whole-bamboo umbrella produced for King Charles III of England. It was also the umbrella-maker of choice for the Neapolitan actor Antonio De Curtis, known as Toto, and appears in the classic film Natale in Casa Cupiello. Alongside retail, the workshop repairs umbrellas it has made over decades and keeps a small on-site museum of pieces and tools documenting the craft. Visitors come less for a fixed catalogue than for an umbrella built to their own cane, handle and canopy choices, made in the same hand-steamed, single-piece method the shop has used since the 19th century.
Ezpeleta has made rain umbrellas in Oñati, in Spain's Gipuzkoa province, without interruption since 1935, and is described as one of the only businesses left in Spain still assembling umbrellas entirely by hand — the original machinery, by the family's own account, has not changed since the factory opened.
Best for Hand-assembled Basque umbrellas from the original 1935 workshop
Ezpeleta has made rain umbrellas in Oñati, in Spain's Gipuzkoa province, without interruption since 1935, and is described as one of the only businesses left in Spain still assembling umbrellas entirely by hand — the original machinery, by the family's own account, has not changed since the factory opened. The house is 100% family-owned, now in its third generation of Ezpeletas.
The family's footprint grew well beyond that first workshop: in 1954 the second generation relocated part of the business to Vigo and opened a new factory there, and in 1988 the third generation opened what is now the group's largest factory, across the border in Vila Nova de Cerveira, Portugal. That larger operation diversified into outdoor furniture and parasols worked in polymers, metals and fabrics — but the original Oñati site kept making umbrellas, in the family's words, "with the same passion as before."
The umbrellas themselves lean on imported materials selected for quality: fine Italian fabrics and handles finished to order, with a dedicated "Handmade in Spain" line sold alongside the brand's wider wholesale catalog. Ninety years after Oñati's original rain-umbrella factory opened, it remains the throughline connecting a multinational outdoor-furniture group back to one Basque family's original hand trade.
Rolf Lippke's family umbrella trade runs back to 1882, when Josef Müller opened an umbrella repair shop in Georgswalde, a town in North Bohemia now called Jiříkov in the Czech Republic — a lineage Lippke, its current keeper, counts as roughly 142 years and eight generations deep.
Best for Made-to-order umbrellas, built piece by piece
Rolf Lippke's family umbrella trade runs back to 1882, when Josef Müller opened an umbrella repair shop in Georgswalde, a town in North Bohemia now called Jiříkov in the Czech Republic — a lineage Lippke, its current keeper, counts as roughly 142 years and eight generations deep. He trained in the craft in Dresden in the 1980s and in 1998 took over a specialty umbrella business from two retiring sisters, Hoffmann & Bouffée, running it in Dresden until mid-2013, when he relocated to Berlin — first into the Wedding district, taking over the Metz umbrella shop, later to Steglitz.
Lippke is among the last formally trained umbrella makers from East Germany: the profession Schirmmacher was struck from Germany's official list of apprenticeable trades in 1998, the same year he took over his first shop, meaning no one after him can be certified in it the traditional way. Every umbrella is made individually to order from customer-chosen fabric, stick wood and grip, with automatic or manual opening options, and demand keeps his shop booked months out. He has described the work as more than a product — "a lifestyle" — a claim that carries weight coming from one of the very last people in the country still permitted to call it a trained profession.
A Hoi An-based maker of handcrafted silk lanterns from 10cm to 150cm, including hand-painted and 3D flower variants, plus handmade bamboo lamps from 10 to 50cm. Lanterns collapse for shipping and expand like an umbrella in under a minute.
Yun Gyu-sang, born in 1943 in Wanju county, is South Korea's only artisan formally designated for making jiwusan — the bamboo-and-oiled-hanji umbrella once produced across the country but now sustained by a single named craftsman.
Best for South Korea's only living jiwusan maker — bamboo-and-hanji oiled paper umbrellas from Jeonju
Yun Gyu-sang, born in 1943 in Wanju county, is South Korea's only artisan formally designated for making jiwusan — the bamboo-and-oiled-hanji umbrella once produced across the country but now sustained by a single named craftsman. He apprenticed at an umbrella factory in 1960 and later learned traditional paper-umbrella construction from craftsmen Jin Woo-bong and Eom Ju-hak. After vinyl umbrellas displaced the trade, Yun spent three years from 2005 rebuilding the old hand tools and reconstructing the forgotten techniques, eventually reviving jiwusan made from Jeonju hanji, the region's noted mulberry paper. In 2011, Jeollabuk-do province designated him holder of Intangible Cultural Heritage No. 45, Usanjang (umbrella maker) — a title he holds alone nationwide. Jeonju's jiwusan, prized for the strength and translucency of local hanji stretched over a bamboo-rib frame, was historically distributed nationally and exported to Japan and Germany. His umbrellas are sold through the Jeonju Craft Exhibition Hall (전주공예품전시관), the city's official crafts showroom and online shop in Hanok Village, in small and large sizes with traditional paper or cloth gift-wrapping on request.
Bucklesbury is a London design house whose umbrellas are handmade in England, made by craftsmen the brand describes as continuing London's umbrella-making tradition back to 1805 — the same period the city's oldest surviving umbrella manufacturers trace their own founding to.
Best for English-made umbrellas with a solid single-piece chestnut or maple shaft
Bucklesbury is a London design house whose umbrellas are handmade in England, made by craftsmen the brand describes as continuing London's umbrella-making tradition back to 1805 — the same period the city's oldest surviving umbrella manufacturers trace their own founding to. Its Classic range is built around a beechwood shaft; the London Umbrella, its higher-tier model, is cut from a single piece of chestnut wood for men's versions and maple for women's, rather than an assembled multi-piece stick.
Every umbrella is marketed under Bucklesbury's own "Rain Tested in England" standard and ships in a branded gift box with a cotton dust bag, positioning the line at the gift and luxury-accessory end of English umbrella-making rather than a working trade counter. The company also makes handmade Italian leather bags and England-bound hand-bound journals, running the umbrella line alongside a small stable of English- and Italian-made goods rather than as a single-product workshop.
Operating from Marsh Wall in London's Docklands, Bucklesbury reads as a newer design house explicitly built on the city's older umbrella-making lineage, distinguishing its top model by the solid single-piece wood shaft that its Classic range doesn't share.
Founded in London in 1868 by Thomas Fox, and hand-building umbrellas at its Wickham Road, Croydon works since 2006, Fox Umbrellas offers gents', ladies', golf and telescopic models with handles in hardwood, Malacca, whangee or horn.
Best for British-made umbrellas with a genuine choice of handle craftsmanship
Fox Umbrellas was founded by Thomas Fox in 1868 in the City of London. The company moved into its purpose-built factory on Wickham Road in Shirley, Croydon in April 2006, and it is from that current works, not a single 1868 site, that it has made umbrellas by hand for the last two decades, continuing a hand-building tradition that stretches back to the firm's founding. The range runs from tube and stick-frame gents' umbrellas to ladies' models, golf umbrellas, telescopic folding designs and parasols, alongside walking sticks and raincoats, with bespoke commissions available for customers who want a specific combination of size, canopy and handle. Handles are offered across a genuine spread of materials - hardwood, Malacca cane, whangee bamboo, leather, maple, and pieces finished with horn insets - rather than a single house style, letting an umbrella be built closer to a piece of furniture than a disposable accessory. The firm's umbrellas have appeared on screen in productions including Atomic Blonde and Peaky Blinders, and the retailer Sir Gordon Bennett credits Fox with appearances 'from James Bond to Atomic Blonde' among the films that have used its umbrellas, a reputation the brand trades on without needing to claim any single title. Prices for ready-made models run roughly 90 to 240 pounds and up depending on handle and frame, with the workshop shipping worldwide from its current Croydon site.
Lockwood Umbrellas is a London manufacturer working out of a North London manufactory, with its retail presence at the Tea Building on Shoreditch High Street.
Best for Steel-framed, hand-sewn umbrellas with buffalo-horn handles and a choice
Lockwood Umbrellas is a London manufacturer working out of a North London manufactory, with its retail presence at the Tea Building on Shoreditch High Street. Each umbrella is built on a Grade A steel frame with hand-sewn reinforcements and lathe-turned brass fittings, construction the company frames as a deliberate return to centuries-old umbrella-making methods rather than a mass-produced frame.
The materials list is unusually specific for a modern maker: canopies in water-resistant cotton, handles in ethically sourced buffalo horn, and shafts turned from a choice of hardwoods — maple, chestnut, whangee bamboo, or bark ash — sourced from sustainable woodlands. That range of named timbers, alongside the horn handles, puts Lockwood's construction closer to the bespoke English shooting-and-country tradition of umbrella-making than to a fashion accessory line, built as pieces intended to be rebuilt and re-covered rather than replaced.
For a comparatively young addition to London's umbrella trade, Lockwood's combination of a steel-framed, hand-sewn build with sustainably sourced horn and hardwood detailing places it in direct company with the city's older manufacturers on construction quality, even without their multi-generational history.
Alois Kirchtag, great-grandfather of the family's current keeper Andreas Kirchtag, opened a sun-and-rain umbrella business at Getreidegasse 50 in Salzburg's old town in 1903.
Best for Five-hour hand-built umbrellas with turned wooden stocks and brass fittings
Alois Kirchtag, great-grandfather of the family's current keeper Andreas Kirchtag, opened a sun-and-rain umbrella business at Getreidegasse 50 in Salzburg's old town in 1903. After a spell at number 42, the workshop moved in 1942 into a 13th-century building at Getreidegasse 22, where it still trades today under a metal umbrella sign hung above the entrance — the old guild-era marker of an umbrella maker's premises.
More than a century on, Kirchtag still builds umbrellas the old way, in its own on-site workshop: assembling a finished stick umbrella from stock, canopy fabric and frame takes roughly five hours by hand. Wooden stocks are turned from maple, cherry, ash, oak or hickory; mechanical fittings are cast in brass or Austrian aluminum; and the opening springs are hand-formed from piano wire rather than bought pre-made. Customers after something fully bespoke can order a stick umbrella handcrafted in every part, with Kirchtag's own staff advising on the choice.
Alongside its own hand-built umbrellas, the shop stocks branded lines like Doppler and Knirps, runs a repair service and corporate-branding line, and sells leather goods, travel luggage and walking sticks — but it is the on-premises umbrella craft, one of very few left standing in Europe, that the metal umbrella sign still points to.
Il Marchesato was founded in 1978 as a family company in Saluzzo, a small town near Turin whose historical status as a marquisate — a marchesato — gives the brand its name.
Best for Hand-enameled animal handles and gold-plated fittings on made-in-Italy umbrellas
Il Marchesato was founded in 1978 as a family company in Saluzzo, a small town near Turin whose historical status as a marquisate — a marchesato — gives the brand its name. Everything is made by hand in Italy: umbrella canopies in premium fabric over lightweight fiberglass ribs, with fittings finished in 24-karat gold plating or 925 sterling silver, and handles carved and hand-enameled into animal forms, occasionally set with Swarovski crystals.
The brand positions its umbrellas closer to jewelry than outerwear — new designs are released monthly, and pieces can be personalized with engraved initials, names or short messages, extending the same customization common to its walking sticks and shoehorns, which share the same gold-plated, hand-finished treatment.
Run as a family business across nearly five decades, Il Marchesato sits at the ornamental end of Italian umbrella-making: rather than compete on the stripped-down solid-stick tradition of Milan's oldest houses, it built its identity on decorative metalwork and enamel handle-carving, a distinct register within the same small world of Italian artisan umbrella makers.
In Fenshuiling, a small town outside Luzhou in Sichuan, the Bi family has made oil-paper umbrellas for six generations, a lineage now carried by Bi Liufu, a national-level Intangible Cultural Heritage inheritor for oil-paper umbrella craft and a Guinness World Record holder for hand-made oil-paper umbrellas.
Best for Hand-painted, six-generation Sichuan oil-paper umbrellas, custom-ordered from thousands of patterns
In Fenshuiling, a small town outside Luzhou in Sichuan, the Bi family has made oil-paper umbrellas for six generations, a lineage now carried by Bi Liufu, a national-level Intangible Cultural Heritage inheritor for oil-paper umbrella craft and a Guinness World Record holder for hand-made oil-paper umbrellas. His company, formally established in 2011 as successor to the old Fenshui Oil-Paper Umbrella Factory, still works from Fenshuiling town, where roughly 95 staff — nearly half of them trained technicians — carry an umbrella through cutting, rib-splitting, paper-cutting, plate-making, stone-block printing, edge-netting, mounting, tung-oiling, threading, and binding across a claimed 108 separate steps. Bamboo ribs, hand-cut paper, and tung oil remain the base materials; decoration ranges from hand-painting and stone-block printing to pressed botanical specimens, with thousands of pattern and size combinations sold or made to order. Fenshui's oil-paper umbrella entered China's national intangible-heritage list in 2008. The workshop's umbrellas have traveled beyond Sichuan: featured in the state television program 'Intangible Heritage in China,' demonstrated at Tsinghua University and Beijing's International Intangible Heritage Week, and licensed for a tie-in with the mobile game Fantasy Westward Journey.
Paraguas Carballo traces to Nogueira de Ramuín, a town in Galicia's Ribeira Sacra where two traditional trades ran in the same family: one grandfather was an afilador (knife-grinder), the other a paragüero (umbrella-mender).
Best for Hand-assembled umbrellas and parasols from a third-generation Galician family workshop
Paraguas Carballo traces to Nogueira de Ramuín, a town in Galicia's Ribeira Sacra where two traditional trades ran in the same family: one grandfather was an afilador (knife-grinder), the other a paragüero (umbrella-mender). In 1952 Rogelio and Teresa, the founders, brought that trade to A Coruña, taking over the ground floor of an old wooden house on Panaderas street as shop and workshop. As the business grew, family members José Manuel, Camilo and Rogelio bought a dedicated factory on Torre street, where the workshop still stands today under third-generation owner David Lama Carballo and his siblings Rogelio and Teresa.
About 5,000 umbrellas a year are still made in-house at the Torre street workshop — maple handles, fiberglass or solid steel ribs, and Italian waterproofed polyester canopies, with bamboo-root handles on the higher-end pieces. Carballo also repairs umbrellas and distributes both its own production and other brands across northern Spain, from Asturias and Cantabria through the Basque Country, Navarra and northern Castile-León, from two retail points in A Coruña.
Owner David Lama has noted a recent uptick in demand for higher-quality, longer-lasting umbrellas — people, he says, are tired of throwing cheap ones away — a trend that plays directly to a workshop still cutting and assembling by hand.
A working umbrella factory near Chiang Mai's Bo Sang village, hand-finishing bamboo-framed umbrellas in oiled cotton, sa paper or hardwood; many pieces are sold through Bo Sang's own tourist shops, alongside custom and repair orders.
Best for Working umbrella factory near Chiang Mai's Bo Sang village
Sunisa Umbrella Works, run by Sunisa Phetsana, operates from Maekhu in Chiang Mai's Doi Saket district, about a five-minute scooter ride from Bo Sang, the umbrella-making village roughly 10km east of Chiang Mai's Old City on the San Kamphaeng handicraft road. Bo Sang's craft tradition runs over 200 years: bamboo frames are covered in sa paper, made from mulberry bark, then hand-painted in slow strokes with floral and wildlife motifs that have become recognized symbols of Chiang Mai. Sunisa's factory makes several umbrella types along these lines - Chiang Mai Classic umbrellas in waterproof oiled cotton over bamboo, paper umbrellas with bamboo frames, and heavier hardwood-framed market umbrellas - alongside bamboo folding hand fans in mulberry paper and fabric. Rather than selling only through its own storefront, the workshop supplies many of the umbrellas sold in Bo Sang's own tourist shops, putting it inside the same supply chain as the village it sits beside. It also takes custom and promotional-branding orders and offers repair and renovation for umbrellas it or others have made, running Monday to Saturday by appointment for buyers who want to see production directly. The shop's bamboo is sourced locally and described as fast-renewing, in keeping with the low-impact materials - bamboo, mulberry paper, cotton - that have defined Chiang Mai's umbrella trade since it began.
Delos-France was started in August 2000 by Gérard Delos, a former production and creation manager at Dalbin, one of the three umbrella houses that had carried Aurillac's umbrella trade through the 20th century.
Best for A patented, owner-repairable square umbrella built from five interchangeable parts
Delos-France was started in August 2000 by Gérard Delos, a former production and creation manager at Dalbin, one of the three umbrella houses that had carried Aurillac's umbrella trade through the 20th century. When Piganiol acquired Dalbin that same year, Delos struck out on his own with a design he had developed and patented: the Carré Delos, a square umbrella built from five independent parts that screw together and come apart again without tools, on machines he built himself.
The modularity is the point. Every part — canopy, ribs, shaft, handle — is individually replaceable, which Delos-France markets as the only umbrella a customer can repair themselves rather than sending back to a workshop. The square canopies are cut as a single seamless piece of Teflon-treated, UV-rated fabric and printed with reproductions of contemporary artists' work, so each design functions as both umbrella and small commissioned artwork. The Carré Delos won a gold medal at the Concours Lépine, France's long-running inventors' competition.
Working out of a small atelier at 14 rue du Rocher, in the town Piganiol also calls home, Delos-France is Aurillac's other surviving umbrella maker — a one-man patent-holder's answer to the same regional trade, built around repairability rather than the traditional folding frame.
Pipli, a small Odisha town on the Bhubaneswar–Puri highway, was reportedly established by the kings of Puri to house the tailors who made ceremonial textiles for the Jagannath Temple; written evidence of appliqué work there dates back to AD 1054.
Best for Hand-appliquéd garden and children's umbrellas from Odisha's GI-tagged Pipli craft
Pipli, a small Odisha town on the Bhubaneswar–Puri highway, was reportedly established by the kings of Puri to house the tailors who made ceremonial textiles for the Jagannath Temple; written evidence of appliqué work there dates back to AD 1054. Those hereditary tailors, known as Darjis, hand-cut fabric motifs of flowers, birds and mythical figures and stitch them onto a base cloth using bakhia, buttonhole and reverse-appliqué techniques, historically producing the chandua canopies and chhati — ceremonial umbrellas — that dress Lord Jagannath's chariots during the annual Ratha Yatra. Pipli appliqué, or chandua work, received Geographical Indication recognition in 2008.
Diamond Applique Work Shop, run from two showrooms in the Pipli market by proprietor J Khan, has been in the trade for roughly a quarter-century, drawing on a workforce of close to a thousand artisans. Alongside lamp shades, cushion covers and shamiyana canopies, garden umbrellas and children's umbrellas are among its core product lines — the same hand-appliqué technique once reserved for the deities' ceremonial chhati, now stitched onto mounted umbrella canopies for everyday and garden use.
For a craft under real pressure from machine lace and sewing-machine shortcuts, a workshop still fielding hand-stitched appliqué umbrellas at this scale, out of the original GI-tagged village, is a rare working link to Pipli's original ceremonial trade.
The business at Kölner Straße 74 in Leverkusen-Opladen began in 1912, when Gustav Adrion started going door to door collecting broken umbrellas, repairing them by hand, and bringing them back to their owners.
Best for Hand-cut, made-to-measure umbrellas from a Rhineland workshop tracing back
The business at Kölner Straße 74 in Leverkusen-Opladen began in 1912, when Gustav Adrion started going door to door collecting broken umbrellas, repairing them by hand, and bringing them back to their owners. Christian Kappertz took the business over from Adrion in 1968, and it still trades under the older name, Hut- und Schirmmoden Adrion, alongside Kappertz's own Schirmmoden Fabrikation — a hat-and-umbrella specialty house now well past its 112th year.
Umbrellas are still made in the shop's own workshop in traditional handwork, cut to customer wishes: fabric is hand-cut and sewn, then applied by hand to a prepared frame built to the customer's measurements, in polyester, satin or nylon canopy fabric with hemmed edges, over understocks in 10mm or 14mm steel, wood, or fiberglass, finished with grips in natural woods like chestnut in derby, round-hook or straight styles. The workshop makes support umbrellas, long stick umbrellas, and shoulder umbrellas alongside standard designs, and still repairs umbrellas it didn't make.
Beyond umbrellas, the same shop sells and makes hats and caps and supplies shooting-club regalia — a small-town German specialty trade that has kept its founding family-workshop model for over a century after a mender's door-to-door round started it.
La Bottega della Maiolica was opened by Accursio Toto, a Maestro d'Arte, in Piazza Saverio Friscia in Sciacca in the early 1980s. Every piece, from Teste di Moro heads to albarelli jars, umbrella stands, tiles and pinecone good-luck charms, is modeled and decorated entirely by hand.
Founded 1986 by Jean-Pierre Yvon as a tribute to Jacques Demy's Palme d'Or film, this Cherbourg manufacture builds fully repairable French umbrellas - Le Milady, Le Milord and more - each embroidered with the house's coat of arms.
Best for Hand-built, fully repairable French umbrellas from the Cherbourg manufacture founded in tribute
Le Parapluie de Cherbourg was founded in 1986 by Jean-Pierre Yvon, then 22, whose family had worked in Cherbourg leather trades since 1800; he registered the brand as Le Veritable Cherbourg, taking its name and reference point from Jacques Demy's 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the Palme d'Or winner that made Catherine Deneuve a star and centred on a mother running the town's umbrella shop. The business is now run by his son, Charles Yvon, and the manufacture occupies the former Banque de France building on the Quai Alexandre III, opposite Cherbourg's docks. Umbrellas are made in France across several named models - Le Milady, Le Milord, L'Antibourrasque, Le Voyageur - each carrying the house's coat of arms embroidered directly onto the canopy fabric, with prices running roughly 160 to 380 euros depending on size and finish. The house's core promise is repairability rather than novelty: every component, from rib to handle to canopy, can be replaced individually over the umbrella's life, so a Cherbourg umbrella is meant to be restored rather than discarded. The workshop holds France's Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant (Living Heritage Enterprise) certification, the state's recognition for firms preserving traditional manufacturing skill. It is one of the rare cases of a working manufacture built directly from a film's afterlife rather than a marketing tie-in added later.
Pasotti was founded in 1956 by Ernesta Pasotti, who opened her own workshop in her home village of Castellucchio, near Mantua, after learning the trade at an umbrella factory in Milan.
Best for Hand-made Italian umbrellas with enameled and crystal-set handles from Ernesta
Pasotti was founded in 1956 by Ernesta Pasotti, who opened her own workshop in her home village of Castellucchio, near Mantua, after learning the trade at an umbrella factory in Milan. The business has stayed in the family since, now run by the next generation, and every piece is still described as entirely hand-made, typically taking three to five weeks to complete.
The house works in fine Italian fabrics, wood and brass, with a decorative streak that runs through much of its range: enameled wood handles, Swarovski crystal accents, and animal- and figure-shaped grips finished by hand alongside the more restrained classic models. That combination — an artisanal construction method paired with ornamental detailing — has carried Pasotti's umbrellas and parasols into stores worldwide since a single-village workshop start nearly seven decades ago.
For a house that began as one woman's workshop in a small Lombard village, Pasotti's continued hand production — rather than a shift to factory scale — is the throughline from Ernesta Pasotti's original bench to the umbrellas made under the same name today.
Aurillac manufacture founded 1884 (renamed Piganiol in 1931), hand-assembling cotton-canvas umbrellas with chestnut handles and brass fittings; about 30 workers produce over 50,000 umbrellas a year, backed by a five-year warranty.
Best for About 30 workers produce over 50,000 umbrellas a year
Piganiol's manufacture traces to 1 February 1884, when Jean-Baptiste Poignet and umbrella merchant Jacques Vaurs opened a workshop on Aurillac's rue des Fosses; the firm changed hands twice before Rene Piganiol, son-in-law of a later owner, took over direction in 1931 and gave the house its current name. Aurillac, in the Cantal, grew into France's umbrella-making capital partly by historical accident: pilgrims returning from Santiago de Compostela once brought back the copper later worked into umbrella fittings, while shaft wood came from local forests and the cotton canvas from Spain, oiled afterward for waterproofing. Piganiol still builds along the same lines today - handles in chestnut wood fitted with brass, canopies in cotton canvas - across models including the signature L'Aurillac and the eight-colour Parapluie de Berger, a shepherd's umbrella style. The workshop earned France's Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant (Living Heritage Enterprise) label in 2012, recognition for maintaining traditional manufacturing skill, and it backs its umbrellas with a five-year warranty. About thirty people now work the Aurillac ateliers, producing more than 50,000 umbrellas a year - a substantial output for a firm that still assembles by hand rather than importing finished frames, and one of the last houses keeping Aurillac's umbrella trade a living industry rather than a museum piece.
Arnold Strotz opened his own umbrella workshop in Uznach, in Switzerland's canton of St.
Best for Handmade rain, sun and garden umbrellas from a Swiss factory
Arnold Strotz opened his own umbrella workshop in Uznach, in Switzerland's canton of St. Gallen, in 1851, right after finishing his apprenticeship, selling handmade individual pieces first to regional shops and then nationally. Around thirty Swiss umbrella-making firms existed at the trade's peak before industrial mass production and foreign competition thinned the field; Strotz is the one that survived, and today it is Switzerland's only remaining umbrella factory still running its own production, now in its fifth generation, led by cousins Andrea and Roman Strotz alongside fourth-generation Edgar Strotz.
Seven production staff turn out roughly 8,000 umbrellas a year at the Uznach workshop — about 2,000 to 4,000 of them rain umbrellas, the rest sun and garden umbrellas — with each piece built from around 300 components in about 40 minutes: fabric cut, panels stitched, handle assembled, snap buttons attached, final assembly by hand. Fabric comes from northern Italy where possible, frames from Asia, predominantly in impregnated polyester with natural fabrics available for special orders; enough of the value-adding work happens in Uznach to carry the Swiss Made label.
Since 2004, Strotz has also co-owned the internationally known Knirps compact-umbrella brand together with Austrian partner Doppler, with the two brands together selling around 700,000 umbrellas a year.
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