Arpin Brand Guidelines: A Rhode Island Moving Family Since 1900 and a Name in Two Hands

A family business from 1900.

Arpin is a moving name that belongs to one family’s story. The company says it was founded in 1900 by the Arpin family, whose roots it places in Drummondville, Quebec, and that it began by delivering coal and ice with a single horse and cart. Its own accounts differ in one detail: the about page of Arpin International Group says the family emigrated from Drummondville to Providence, Rhode Island, and founded the business there, while a company post from February 2023 places the start of the moving business in Drummondville in 1900, before the family crossed into the United States.

What the company agrees on is the family. Arpin International Group describes itself as a fifth-generation, family-owned business headquartered in West Warwick, Rhode Island, with Peter Arpin as president. In November 2025 it marked what it called its 125th anniversary, saying that since 1900 the company “has remained a privately held, family-owned, and operated business” and that it now has offices in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region.

For most of its history the name covered several businesses under one parent, Arpin Group, Inc. Trade press shows the structure. In December 2005 FreightWaves described Arpin International Group as the freight-forwarding unit of Arpin Group Inc., then based in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. In March 2006 it reported that the domestic carrier Paul Arpin Van Lines, part of the Arpin Group, had changed its name with immediate effect to Arpin Van Lines.

One name, several companies.

The 2006 renaming was a branding decision, and the company said so. Announcing it, Arpin Van Lines’ president said the change made the name “consistent with other Arpin entities including Arpin Group and Arpin International” and was “intended to convey a closer corporate image within our company,” FreightWaves reported. After the change, every part of the group carried the plain family name.

The international side grew by purchase as well as by new offices. In December 2005, FreightWaves reported, Arpin International Group bought Advantage International Relocation UK Ltd, a London-based freight forwarder and household-goods mover, with the aim of adding to its international presence and warehouse operations. Today the company lists offices in Germany, India, Ireland, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom as well as the United States.

Arpin has also tied its name to green energy. The company says Arpin Renewable Energy was founded in 2009, and in a 2020 post it described a free public electric-vehicle charging station that Arpin Group and a local furniture retailer opened in a West Warwick car park on 27 August 2010. The company presents this as part of a wider environmental programme, which it calls “Arpin’s Forward Footprint” and reports on under the heading of ESG.

The main split came in 2020. On 27 April 2020 The Wheaton Group, the Indianapolis moving company, announced that it had acquired Arpin Van Lines, formerly headquartered in West Warwick, adding it to a group that also includes Wheaton World Wide Moving, Bekins Van Lines and Stevens Worldwide Van Lines. The announcement said Arpin Van Lines had until then been a division of Arpin Group, Inc., and that the other divisions, including Arpin International Group, would stay with Arpin Group, Inc. “with no affiliation to The Wheaton Group or Arpin Van Lines.” The Arpin family would continue to run its own family-owned agents under the Arpin Van Lines name as part of the Wheaton network.

The family business kept growing on the international side. In February 2023 Arpin International Group announced it had acquired Stephens Moving Services of Cape Coral, Florida, a company specialising in moves across the border between the United States and Canada; the company linked the purchase to the family’s Canadian roots. In August 2026 it launched Arpin South American Groupage, a service that consolidates shipments bound for South America through hubs in Miami, San Francisco and Cartagena, Colombia.

Design and documentation.

Moving and relocation companies present themselves in two registers at once. One is physical: vans, trailers, crates and containers that carry a company’s name along streets and across borders. The other is corporate: service pages, client portals, apps and reports written for the human-resources and mobility teams that commission employee moves.

Livery is the older of the two. American van-line names such as Allied and North American date from 1928 and 1933, according to English Wikipedia, and groups that later bought them have kept those names in use: SIRVA, formed in 1998 and 1999, still lists Allied and northAmerican as brands in their own right on its website. Crate and container work shows up in the service lists themselves: SIRVA’s website menus separate household-goods, commercial and specialty moving, and a May 2026 Cartus release lists fine-art wrapping and transportation, temperature-controlled wine shipping and pet transportation among the services of its executive programme.

The corporate side is mostly software and programme names. Cartus lists its CartusMobile app and its MovePro360 hub in its own timeline, and SIRVA lists a technology platform, Connect+, beside its relocation services; both describe home sale and purchase, temporary housing, immigration and destination support as parts of one managed programme for an employer.

Corporate pages carry the rest of the story: networks of agents and partners, owners, offices and depots, and the countries served. Those figures change with each acquisition, merger or refinancing, so this guide gives them only with the date and the source that reported them, and marks clearly what rests on a company’s own word.

The family name as the mark.

The result is a name held in two places. The address arpin.com now forwards to a site titled “Arpin Trademark Site,” whose footer carries a 2026 copyright line for Wheaton Van Lines of Indianapolis and which deals with claims for Arpin Van Lines moves. The family business presents itself separately as Arpin International Group, at arpinintl.com, under the line “Our Family Moving Yours Since 1900.” Anyone working with the name has to know which Arpin is meant: the domestic van line inside the Wheaton network, or the family group in West Warwick.

The family group’s own pages lean on heritage and accreditation rather than imagery. Its website opens with the 1900 date, the five generations and the founding story of coal and ice, and lists memberships and quality marks, including FIDI FAIM accreditation, as the company states them. It gives its environmental work its own name, Arpin’s Forward Footprint, and lists a 2024 Excellence in ESG award from Relocate Global among its awards.

For a design guide, Arpin shows how a family surname can carry a whole group of companies, and what happens to that name when one part is sold. Compare SIRVA, another American moving and relocation group built from several van-line names, and Crown Relocations, an international relocation company with a single brand. For this guide we use a coal black, a harbour blue, an ice blue and a brick red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Arpin’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.