Didas

The factory was started in 1825.

Under Willem van Asten (1895-1969), the DIDAS brand has become a national concept whose blankets were very popular. First of all, Willem was an entrepreneur. Just graduated from the textile school of Mönchen-Gladbach, he already added a spinning mill to the family business. His grandfather’s brother-in-law, Willem Diddens, was a co-founder of the weaving mill Diddens & van Asten. The factory grew from a few hundred to nearly a thousand, despite intermediate lows in the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1957 they made an extra floor in their main building. This floor became a showroom where the range of blankets could be viewed. Customers, the retail companies that had to sell the product, were also well received here. Seated in cheerful seats, they had a panoramic view of the distant surroundings through a window that covered the entire width of the floor. When the new floor was finished, the press was invited to admire the beautiful spectacle and, of course, to praise the enjoyment of working in the textile industry in Helmond. At the time, it was in urgent need of manpower.

However, the textile crisis started in the late 1960s, but despite this Willem Asten was not worried. He argued that the companies here were relatively small and that they focused not on blind mass production but on quality and marketing. His son Alfred experienced how quickly the situation could change. Shortly after William’s death, Alfred found that people stopped buying blankets almost overnight and merged with Raymakers out of necessity. The spinning mill closed in 1972 and the last remains of the factory disappeared in 1978.