In 1830, Pierre Antoine Dufour laid the foundation for present-day Sefar. Employed by Heinrich Bodmer, he produced silk bolting cloth for the sieving of flour in Thal, in the Swiss canton of St.Gallen. Three years later, he split from Bodmer and founded Dufour, a company that quickly and successfully expanded abroad.
In 1907, Dufour and five other Swiss family-run companies joined together to form Schweizerische Seidengazefabrik AG. Five years later, the Züricher Beuteltuchfabrik AG was also integrated. This association dominated the world market for silk gauze for decades. Although a single financial entity, Schweizerische Seidengazefarbrik Zürich AG (SSZ), Schweizerische Seidengazefarbrik Thal AG (SST) and Züricher Beuteltuchfabrik AG (ZBF) operated separately on the market before they merged in 1995 to become Sefar AG.
Starting with the acquisition of Tetsilk in the United States in 1932, many subsidiaries have been established all over the world, most of them in the last 10 years.
