Where did velcro come from? The invention that was born stuck to a dog's fur

In Argentona, near the road to Mataró, drivers pass by a large industrial building every day. From one of the side walls hangs a red circle-framed logo: it is the logo of Velcro, the brand that invented and patented the famous fastening and fastening system. In Maresme, the company has its European headquarters and is a true industrial giant in the region: in 2024, Velcro Europe had a turnover of 67.3 million euros, making it the textile company with the highest turnover in the region and the eighth in the sector in the entire province of Barcelona.

Worldwide, Velcro has more than 3,000 employees and manufactures fastening systems for sectors as diverse as footwear, medicine, automotive, construction, and packaging, all based on the system they patented. But how was such a simple yet universal invention born? Who was behind Velcro?

The origin: a dog in the Swiss Alps

The story begins in 1941, in the Swiss Alps. George de Mestral, an amateur electrical engineer and hiking enthusiast, was returning from a mountain walk with his dog when he noticed that both his trousers and the animal's fur were covered in small, spherical seeds. Instead of simply picking them off, he wanted to understand why they stuck so firmly. He examined one under a microscope and discovered hundreds of tiny hooks that clung to the fabric and the animal's fur.

De Mestral thought that this same mechanism could be reproduced artificially. The idea seemed simple: create two textile surfaces, one covered in tiny hooks and another with small loops, which would connect when pressed together and could be separated repeatedly. Putting it into practice, however, was much more complicated. For almost a decade, he experimented with materials and consulted European textile manufacturers, seeking a way to turn that observation of nature into a mass-producible product.

The solution began to take shape in Lyon, where he found polyamide, a sufficiently resistant material with the ability to regain its shape after being bent. Manufacturing the loops was not particularly difficult; the problem was the hooks. Finally, De Mestral devised a device inspired by barbershop hair clippers that allowed him to cut the loops precisely and turn part of them into tiny hooks. The invention was already working, but it needed to be turned into a business.

From invention to business

In 1951, after ten years of testing, De Mestral submitted the patent application for his fastening system in Switzerland. A year later, he founded Velcro S.A. alongside Alfred Gonet, Andre-Louis Burnier, and Jean Michaud. The name also came from two French words: velours, velvet, and crochet, hook. On March 16, 1954, Switzerland granted the first patent for the invention and, the following year, it was also protected in the United States and several European countries.

With the technology legally secured, he began to sell it. In 1956, Velcro launched its first logo and began to market its fastening systems. The company grew rapidly: in 1957 it opened a plant in the United States, in Manchester, New Hampshire, a city with a long textile tradition, and also began to produce in Canada. Two years later, it took another decisive step: it began to produce in Argentona. This establishment turned the Maresme municipality into one of the company's first European industrial bases.

From then on, the system began to multiply its uses. In the sixties, it reached NASA's Apollo program and, in 1969, it traveled to the Moon; shortly after, it spread to footwear, clothing, and over the years, to sectors such as automotive, medicine, the military, logistics, and hygiene products. The original patent eventually gave rise to an entire family of fastening systems, some manufactured today with plastic, stainless steel, or recycled materials. More than eighty years after that walk in the Alps, Velcro continues to have one of its major European bases in Argentona and a name so popular that, often, we no longer use it just to talk about the brand, but about the invention itself.