Accumulators, AFA and a name made of initials.

The VARTA name is younger than the company that created it. The industrial history begins with Adolph Müller and a battery works called Büsche & Müller in Hagen, Westphalia. The brand-history page published by VARTA Automotive dates its founding to 1887; the International Directory of Company Histories says Müller founded the business in January 1888, after seeing a demonstration of a rechargeable accumulator developed by the Tudor brothers.

According to the International Directory, the company took the name Accumulatoren-Fabrik AG, or AFA, in 1890. Its early batteries stored power from dynamos for electricity suppliers, and its Hagen plant ran a battery-powered train system that same year. The VARTA Automotive page credits Müller with making the Baker Runabout electric car known in Germany in 1893, powered by AFA batteries.

The name itself arrived in 1904. Both sources say AFA created VARTA that year, and the International Directory places the new subsidiary, VARTA Accumulatoren Gesellschaft mbH, in Berlin, where AFA’s management had kept offices since 1897. VARTA is an acronym of the German words Vertrieb, Aufladung, Reparatur transportabler Akkumulatoren: sales, charging and repair of portable accumulators. VARTA Automotive says the brand was set up to market compact rechargeable batteries, including batteries for starting combustion engines.

Ownership moved to a family that would hold it for most of the century. The International Directory says Günther Quandt became AFA’s majority shareholder in 1923, and that control remained with the Quandt family into the 1990s. The same history traces the town now linked with the brand to 1949, when the portable-battery business Pertrix Union began production in a factory in Ellwangen, in Baden-Württemberg.

Divided in 2002, reunited in 2020, separated again in 2026.

By the 1970s the company was called Varta AG. In 1977, according to the International Directory of Company Histories, it was reorganised to concentrate on batteries, and a new company, CEAG, took over activities outside that field.

The decisive split came in 2002. The electronics trade journal Evertiq reported in May 2019 that in 2002 the original VARTA AG was divided into three business divisions, which were transferred to different buyers. The VARTA Automotive brand-history page states today that Clarios and VARTA AG of Ellwangen are two different groups of companies with no connection under company law.

The consumer business changed hands again in 2019. Evertiq reported that its owner, Spectrum Brands, sold it to Energizer Holdings at the beginning of that year, and that on 29 May 2019 VARTA AG signed an agreement to buy it back from Energizer. VARTA AG’s chief executive, Herbert Schein, described the deal as a chance to bring together what belongs together.

eeNews Europe reported on 3 January 2020 that the purchase had been completed and that VARTA AG now controlled the worldwide VARTA brand rights for portable batteries, microbatteries and energy storage systems. It described VARTA Consumer Batteries as based in Ellwangen, with its main production in Dischingen, making primary and rechargeable batteries, chargers, power banks, special batteries and lights. Energizer’s own brands page, accessed in October 2026, lists VARTA alongside Rayovac.

The group’s structure changed once more in 2026. VARTA AG said that on 1 October 2026 the Stuttgart District Court opened insolvency proceedings for VARTA AG and three of its subsidiaries, and that the consumer division was not affected because it was legally and operationally independent. On 8 October 2026, VARTA AG announced that the Federal Ministry of Economics had approved the spin-off of VARTA Consumer Batteries GmbH & Co. KGaA, which would again operate as an independent company with its administrative site in Ellwangen-Neunheim and production in Dischingen.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make or sell batteries, from the small cells that go into torches, remote controls and toys to the heavy batteries that start cars, boats and trucks. Battery brands in general sit at many different points in the trade: some names belong to the company that makes the cells, some are owned by retailers or parts chains, and some are licensed to different companies in different parts of the world.

A battery brand’s identity is usually carried less by the product itself than by its packaging, its colours, its slogans and sometimes a mascot, because one sealed case looks much like another. Behind the label, the company that owns the name and the factory that builds the battery may have changed several times. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started the brand, who owns it now, and who actually makes the batteries.

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

One name, several companies.

VARTA is unusual among battery names because it is a description turned into a word. The five letters stand for selling, charging and repairing portable accumulators, and the brand is written in capital letters, as an acronym, on the company’s own pages.

The name also outlived the single company that owned it. After 2002 the same five letters appeared on car batteries sold by one group and on household batteries sold by another, while the two businesses had no legal connection. The VARTA Automotive history page says plainly that its presentation deals only with the automotive side and that the consumer and microbattery businesses belong to VARTA AG in Ellwangen.

The places tell the same story. The VARTA subsidiary was founded in Berlin, the business began in Hagen, and the consumer business now has its administrative home in Ellwangen and its main production in Dischingen, according to eeNews Europe and VARTA AG’s October 2026 statement. Its range, as Evertiq described it in 2019, runs from batteries and rechargeables to chargers, power banks and lights.

Within the consumer battery aisle, VARTA shares its recent history with American names. It passed through Spectrum Brands and then Energizer, the owner of Rayovac, before returning to German ownership in 2020, and its 2026 separation from the wider VARTA AG group gives the consumer brand its own company once again.

For a design guide, VARTA shows how an acronym can carry a brand through divisions, sales and buy-backs, because the letters themselves are the identity. Compare Rayovac, which shared an owner with VARTA’s consumer business, and Energizer, which owned it in 2019. For this guide we use an accumulator red, a cell yellow and a graphite with a condensed sans-serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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