Eliet News

The customer’s problem was my source of inspiration

Emiel Lietaer, founder of ELIET, shares his philosophy.

"My father was a salesman of agricultural machinery. As a child, I grew up among ploughs, tractors and combine harvesters, witnessing firsthand the evolution of agricultural mechanisation in the decades following the Second World War.

Fifty years ago, in my hometown of Otegem, Belgium, I started a small local shop selling garden machinery. Alongside this, we also carried out metal construction work for livestock housing. Through daily contact with professional landscaping contractors who visited the shop, I quickly gained a deep understanding of the challenges they faced in their work.

Driven by my broad mechanical knowledge and a strong desire to help my customers move forward, I decided to start building machines myself to meet their specific needs. That decision marked the birth of ELIET. The name ELIET, by the way, is a combination of the initials of my name: Emiel Lietaer.

One of the very first machines I developed was a shredder and a scarifier. These two machines became the foundation on which a broad product portfolio was later built—and they remain the core of our business to this day.

Because many landscaping contractors working in private gardens operate alone, my philosophy has always been:
one man – one machine. My goal was to ensure that a single operator could do everything with the machine—working, transporting, loading, unloading, servicing—while ensuring that the machine’s capacity was perfectly matched to the capacity of that one person. In this way, I continuously sought to solve as many aspects of the landscaper’s job as possible through intelligent machine design.

This philosophy led me, for example, to the concept of a self-propelled shredder. In 1994, ELIET became the first manufacturer in the world to equip a shredder with wheel drive. The aim was simple: to allow contractors to load and unload their machines easily and drive them—without assistance—directly into the garden to carry out shredding work on site. This innovation proved to be a true revolution in the sector, as it allowed contractors to drive the shredder to the pruning waste, rather than bringing the waste to the machine. For those who purchased an ELIET shredder, this resulted in an unprecedented gain in productivity.

The enthusiasm among contractors was overwhelming, and soon they wanted to push the boundaries of mobility even further. This inspired us to introduce the world’s first track-driven shredder in 1998—another global first brought to market by ELIET.

These are just a few examples of how, over the past 40 years, ELIET has consistently made a difference for its customers. Through innovation, our machines have helped professionals organise their work more efficiently and significantly improve their profitability.

Although I have long since passed retirement age, I remain actively involved in product development and continue to inspire our engineers as they design the machines of tomorrow."

Emiel Lietaer, 20 January 2026