A tailor, an inventor and a record box.

Fellowes began with a cardboard box. The company’s own family-heritage history says Harry Fellowes, who ran a tailoring business in Chicago, met an inventor named Walter Nickel in the Lees Building downtown. Nickel had designed a Liberty Record Storage Box. When Nickel was drafted for the First World War, the company says, Harry bought the idea, offered him an equal partnership after the war, filed the patent and registered The Bankers Box Company. English Wikipedia puts it slightly differently, describing the business as founded in Chicago in 1917 by Harry Fellowes and Walter Nickel together.

The name told customers who the box was for. Fellowes says its first employees were hired in the 1920s and that it built a network of dealers across the United States, with banks as its main customers until the Depression pushed it to widen its market. During those years, the company says, owners and staff took pay cuts and the firm served free soup and coffee to its workers, and sales had recovered by the end of the 1930s. Harry’s sons joined the firm: English Wikipedia dates Folger Fellowes to 1934 and John Fellowes to 1938.

The wartime chapter is part of the company story. During the Second World War, Fellowes says, it secured supplies of corrugated board by arguing its case to the War Production Board in Washington, D.C., while a metal-framed storage line called Staxonsteel was dropped because of its metal content. In the 1950s Folger and John became president and vice president, the business moved to Franklin Park outside Chicago, Staxonsteel returned and an R-Kive box joined the range.

Growth followed in the 1960s and 1970s. The company says it planned regional plants and sales offices across the United States, relaunched the Liberty Box with a more efficient design, and in the 1970s opened its first international subsidiaries, in Canada and the United Kingdom, each with a local factory. In the same decade it moved to a new site at Itasca, Illinois, where its headquarters remain.

From Bankers Box to shredders.

The 1980s widened the company beyond paper storage. English Wikipedia says Harry’s grandson James Fellowes joined in 1969 and became president in 1983, and that the same year the company name changed from Bankers Box to Fellowes to reflect a move into business machines and computer accessories. The company’s own history says it launched the Fellowes brand in that decade to cover shredders, media storage, computer accessories and ergonomic products, while Bankers Box continued as the name on its storage boxes. Peter Fellowes joined in 1989, the company says.

Shredders became the centre of the business. Fellowes says it developed a personal shredder for home and small-office use in the 1990s, and that by the 2000s shredders had become its lead category. Over the same years, according to English Wikipedia, the company added laminating and binding machines, so the name came to stand for desk machinery as well as boxes. The company also says it ran an internal programme called “Advantage Fellowes” in the 1990s, built on lean and kaizen methods.

Its most visible symbol arrived in the 2000s. The company’s history says Fellowes adopted the bulldog as its brand symbol in that decade.

The family stayed in charge through each change. English Wikipedia says James Fellowes became chief executive in 1997. Interior Design reported in August 2019 that James — known as Jamie — was chairman and that his son John Fellowes was president and chief executive. English Wikipedia dates John’s appointment as chief executive to 2014; the company’s own history places it in the 2010s and says John Fellowes II joined the business in 2001.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all office-supply names: Leitz, Rexel, Fellowes, Swingline, Esselte, Bostitch and ACCO. Office-supply brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a stationery shop to an office-furniture catalogue.

An office-supply brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single stapler or file than by a name, a colour and the products people recognise on a desk, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factories or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its identity has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Fellowes Brands, still a family company.

The company has kept growing its name as it has grown its range. English Wikipedia says it became Fellowes Brands in 2015 as its portfolio widened, and the company’s history says that in the 2010s it moved into new categories including air purification and furniture. It celebrated its centenary in 2017 with events in Chicago, Barcelona and Tokyo, the company says.

Furniture came through acquisitions. Interior Design reported on 15 August 2019 that Fellowes Brands had acquired Trendway Corporation, a family-owned maker of office furniture systems, movable walls and seating in Holland, Michigan, and that Trendway would keep operating from Holland. The same report said Fellowes had first entered contract furniture in 2017 by acquiring ESI Ergonomic Solutions, a maker of height-adjustable tables and workstations, and that the company’s Bankers Box factory sits at its Itasca headquarters.

Ownership has not changed hands. English Wikipedia says members of the Fellowes family have owned and run the company since 1917, and the company describes itself as family-owned and led by its fourth generation.

For a design guide, Fellowes shows how a plain utility product — a storage box named for its first customers — can carry a family business into machinery while the original name survives as a sub-brand. Compare Rexel, the British office-supply name now part of ACCO Brands, and Leitz, the Stuttgart filing maker in the same group. For this guide we use a record-box navy, a corrugate kraft and an archive-paper white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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