Vienna's imperial-era manufacturers are easy to reduce to a gift-shop cliché — porcelain, crystal, chocolate wafers, all vaguely "Habsburg" — but three of the real companies behind those categories are still operating, still based in the city, and still worth telling apart from the mass-produced versions sold under similar names nearby.
Augarten: porcelain that predates the company name
The Vienna Porcelain Manufactory was founded in 1718, making it, according to its own history, the second-oldest porcelain manufactory in Europe after Meissen. That original operation closed in 1864, and the porcelain tradition associated with it lay dormant until 1923, when it was revived under a new name, Augarten, taken from the Baroque park in Vienna where the manufactory and its museum are located.
What visitors see today under the Augarten name continues methods and decorative patterns developed by the original 18th-century manufactory rather than starting fresh, and according to Vienna's official tourism board, porcelain here is still made and hand-painted on site — vases, dinnerware, tea and coffee sets and figurines, spanning styles from Baroque to modern design collaborations. The manufactory building sits inside the Augarten park itself, alongside the Porcelain Museum, close to the Vienna Boys' Choir's Palais Auersperg and concert hall.
Lobmeyr: glass with its own museum built in
J. & L. Lobmeyr has a cleaner, unbroken history than Augarten: founded in 1823 by Josef Lobmeyr Sr. on Weihburggasse in Vienna, the firm has stayed in family hands for six generations, according to its own published company history. Ludwig Lobmeyr, the founder's son, expanded the business into one of the defining names in Austrian-Bohemian glass production and helped found what is now Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts in 1864. Later generations worked directly with major figures of Viennese Modernism — Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos among them — and the company's chandeliers have gone into the Vienna State Opera and New York's Metropolitan Opera.
The practical detail for a visitor: Lobmeyr's flagship store on Kärntner Straße, in central Vienna, underwent renovation starting in 1987, and the company installed the Vienna Glass Museum on the store's second floor as part of that renovation, according to Lobmeyr's own history page. That means you can see a genuine collection of the company's glasswork and shop at the same address, without needing to travel to a separate factory site.
Manner: the wafer company you can see but not tour
Manner is different from the other two in one important way: it's a large-scale food manufacturer, not a small luxury workshop, and its most visible presence in the city is a building, not a shop experience. Josef Manner & Comp. AG was founded in 1890 (the company's own site describes "135+ years" of history dating from 1889–1890), and its production headquarters sits at Wilhelminenstraße 6 in Vienna's Hernals district — the pink factory building visible from several vantage points around the city, including from trains passing along the Gürtel.
According to Manner's own site, the company still manufactures at that Vienna site and at a second production facility in Wolkersdorf, in Lower Austria, and exports its confectionery to more than 50 countries. What isn't on offer is a public factory tour: Manner's own site lists retail shops rather than a visitor programme for its production sites, and the most accessible way to engage with the brand as a tourist is through one of its dedicated Manner Shops — including one at Stephansplatz, in the heart of Vienna's old town — rather than the factory itself.
Telling the genuine article from a souvenir
Across all three of these, the same test applies: a genuinely Austrian-made object will carry the maker's specific name — Augarten, Lobmeyr, Manner — attached to a shop, store label, or museum tied to that company, not a generic regional descriptor like "Viennese porcelain" or "Austrian crystal" on its own. Souvenir shops around Stephansplatz and the inner city sell large volumes of porcelain- and glass-styled goods with no connection to any of these three manufacturers, priced to look similar at a glance. If a shop can't or won't tell you which company actually produced a piece, that absence of information is itself useful — it tells you the item isn't being sold on the strength of a real manufacturer's name, whatever the price tag suggests.
What this guide does not cover
This article covers three manufacturers still active in Vienna and what a visitor can realistically see of each. It doesn't cover the Wiener Werkstätte as a broader design movement, Vienna's coffeehouse culture, or shipping and customs rules for buying fragile goods to take home — those are separate questions worth their own research before you commit to a large purchase.