Kirchtag

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.