Superior Essex Brand Guidelines: From 1930 Essex Wire to an LS-Owned Atlanta Group

A magnet-wire company with Fort Wayne roots.

Superior Essex joins two older American wire businesses. The first, Essex Wire Corporation, was founded in 1930, English Wikipedia says, as a maker of parts for original-equipment manufacturers; the Korean business daily ChosunBiz reported in October 2025 that it began when the wire assembly division of the carmaker Ford was spun off. English Wikipedia’s article on the inventor George Jacobs, founder of the Dudlo magnet-wire company, says that after General Cable moved Dudlo’s work from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Rome, New York, by 1933, Essex Wire was formed and set up in the former Dudlo factory. Fort Wayne went on to be known for magnet wire, the fine enamelled copper wire wound into the coils of motors and transformers.

Essex grew quickly. English Wikipedia says it ran 44 plants in North America by 1965. The name also reached motor racing: an Essex Wire team owned by the American driver Skip Scott entered a Ford GT40 at the 1966 Le Mans 24 Hours, where the young Jacky Ickx made his Le Mans debut, according to Wikipedia’s account of the race; the car retired during the night with engine trouble.

The second business, Superior Cable, dates from 1954, English Wikipedia says. The two were combined as Superior Essex, which English Wikipedia dates to April 1999. The company was later listed on the Nasdaq exchange, ChosunBiz reported in November 2025, before it became part of a Korean group.

An LS company since 2008.

On 11 June 2008, LS Cable of South Korea announced the purchase of Superior Essex, which English Wikipedia’s article on LS Cable & System describes as an Atlanta-based maker of magnet wire and communications cable; Wikipedia says the deal extended LS’s reach into North America and Europe, and ChosunBiz reported in 2025 that the LS group made the company an affiliate in 2008. The Korean daily Maeil Business Newspaper described Superior Essex in January 2025 as LS Group’s North American wire company, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, and as the parent of Essex Solutions. For the related Korean cable maker, see LS Cable.

The magnet-wire side has changed shape more than once. In October 2020 Superior Essex and the Japanese cable maker Furukawa Electric announced that they had finalised a global joint venture, Essex Furukawa Magnet Wire, based in Atlanta, according to their joint press release. The release said the venture built on an earlier magnet-wire partnership between the two companies and put particular weight on wire for electric and hybrid vehicles, with sales and technical teams on three continents. The same release closed with the company’s registered line at the time, “Everywhere You Live and Work.” Today the business trades as Essex Solutions, which English Wikipedia describes as a maker of magnet wire for the automotive, energy, industrial, commercial and residential markets. ChosunBiz reported in November 2025 that it had production bases in 11 countries across North America, Europe and Asia and made specialty winding wire for electric-vehicle drive motors and transformers. The paper explained winding wire as wire that is wound into coils to carry current in electric motors and transformers, and reported LS’s explanation that orders for its transformer wire were rising with replacement demand for transformers in the United States.

LS prepared a share listing for Essex Solutions in Seoul during 2025. On 26 January 2026, The Asia Business Daily reported, LS withdrew the listing application, which was then under preliminary review by the Korea Exchange, saying it had listened to concerns from minority shareholders and investors; LS said it would review new investment plans with the financial investors that had joined a pre-listing round.

Design and documentation.

Cable makers sell products that most people never see once they are installed. Power lines run under streets and seabeds, data cable sits inside walls, and magnet wire is wound into motors. Their public image therefore leans on what can be photographed before installation: the cable itself, the plant that makes it and the ships that lay it.

The most common picture is the cut end. Company pages and catalogues show a cable in cross-section, with copper or aluminium conductor, insulation, screens and outer sheath set out in rings, often against a plain background. Wide shots of full reels and drums stacked in a yard do the same job at a larger scale, turning a long product into a single object that a camera can frame.

Submarine work has added another set of images. Press releases about offshore wind and grid links are often illustrated with cable-laying vessels, carousels of coiled cable and tall factory towers where high-voltage cable is made. These photographs carry the story of size and reach without needing a consumer product, and they are usually credited to the company that issued them.

Words matter as much as pictures. Makers organise their ranges into product families with short trade names, voltage classes and standard codes, and their corporate pages spend a lot of space on plants, subsidiaries and owners: where a factory stands, when it opened and which group holds the shares. For a designer, the category offers a practical vocabulary of rings, coils, ships and site maps, and a reminder that an industrial identity is often built from documentation rather than from packaging.

Three brands under one parent name.

Superior Essex now works as a parent brand over three businesses, English Wikipedia says: Essex Solutions for magnet wire, Superior Essex Communications for communications cable, and Essex Brownell, a distributor of lead wire, motors, drives, insulation, tapes and repair parts with 16 sites in the United States, Mexico and Canada. Wikipedia gives the group more than 3,000 employees in 11 countries.

The communications business, which English Wikipedia dates to 1998, makes copper and fibre data cable in North America and has worked on power over Ethernet for lighting and building systems. Its PowerWise cable won a 2018 Top Product of the Year award from Environmental Leader, Wikipedia notes, and in 2021 the unit joined the board of the Continental Automated Buildings Association. In May 2023, Brownwood News carried the unit’s announcement that it would expand its plant in Brownwood, Texas, adding about 90,000 square feet for outside-plant fibre, drop fibre and hybrid cables and taking the site past 500,000 square feet, while moving some jobs from older copper cable lines to optical fibre.

For a design guide, Superior Essex shows how an old industrial name can be kept and split into clear sub-brands: one parent word pair, then “Essex” or “Superior Essex” plus a plain description of the business. The heritage sits in the name itself rather than in any ornament or emblem. Compare it with its Korean parent company’s cable business, LS Cable, and with the Georgia wire maker Southwire. For this guide we use night deep blue, line blue and an enamelled copper with a steel grey, set in a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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