Balthasar Merz founded Merz b. Schwanen in 1911 in Albstadt, in Germany's Swabian Alb region, then a major center of textile manufacturing, producing loopwheeled Henleys and underwear on slow-moving machines that knit only about a meter of fabric an hour. The company shut down in 2005, and its original vision might have ended there had designers Gitta and Peter Plotnicki not stumbled on a 90-year-old Merz Henley at a Berlin flea market in 2011 and immediately recognized the fabric's quality. They revived the brand that same year, rebuilding it around the same loopwheeling process Merz had used a century earlier.