An empty shop next to a barber’s chair.

Meijer began in a small Michigan town with a building nobody wanted to rent. Supermarket News, in a company history by Elliot Zwiebach published on 2 March 2009, says Hendrik Meijer came to the United States from the Netherlands in 1907 and, after trying several trades, settled as a barber in Greenville, Michigan. His family owned the buildings next to his shop. Two were let to a drugstore and a restaurant; the third stood empty, and during the Depression neither A&P nor Kroger would take it.

The paper quotes Hendrik’s son Frederik Meijer, from a 2000 interview, on what happened next: when a wholesaler offered to lend the family some stock, they began trading under the name North Side Grocery. The store opened on 30 June 1934. English Wikipedia says the business began as Meijer’s and that Frederik was among its first employees, working alongside his father.

Names changed quickly as the store found its feet. Supermarket News says that in 1936 Hendrik moved to a cash-and-carry policy, which let him lower prices, and renamed the shop Thrift Market. Drawing on a 1984 biography of Hendrik by his grandson Hank Meijer, the paper tells how some customers took the new self-service idea too literally: when wicker baskets were set out under a sign reading “Take a basket, help yourself,” many went home with the baskets. When A&P announced a Greenville store in 1937, the Meijers enlarged their own, measuring A&P shops with a tape to plan the layout.

A second store opened in a former garage in Cedar Springs in late 1942. Because a competing grocer already used the name Thrift Market, the paper says, it opened as Meijer’s Thrift Super Market, putting the family name on the sign. A store in Ionia followed in August 1946, and Grand Rapids came next — in 1948 according to Supermarket News, while Wikipedia dates the first Grand Rapids store, on South Division Avenue, to 1949. By the early 1950s the family had moved its base of operations to Grand Rapids.

Thrifty Acres, a new name on the door and a 2003 makeover.

The format that defines Meijer arrived in the early 1960s. Supermarket News says the company announced in October 1961 that it would add a discount department store beside one of its Grand Rapids supermarkets, and that Hendrik Meijer called the venture Thrifty Acres. The first Thrifty Acres opened on 5 June 1962. At the start the non-food departments were leased to outside operators, an arrangement Hank Meijer later called a retail Tower of Babel; the company removed the lessees and learned to run the general merchandise itself. Wikipedia places the first Thrifty Acres at 28th Street and Kalamazoo Avenue in Grand Rapids and says the store combined grocery and department-store shopping under one roof.

Fred Meijer took over the company in 1964, and the business spread through Michigan and then beyond it. Supermarket News says it moved into Ohio in 1981 by acquiring Twin Fair, and in the 1990s it opened stores in Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky. The Thrifty Acres name gave way to the family’s: the paper says Meijer dropped the Thrifty Acres logo in 1984 in favour of the Meijer name alone, while Wikipedia dates the renaming of the stores to 1986.

In 2003, Wikipedia says, Meijer announced a new store format and company image for all new stores, with a new logo intended to make them seem friendly and inviting. It hired the agency DeVito/Verdi that April for its advertising and retained Rockwell Group, the New York architecture and design firm, to redesign existing stores and set a design for new ones. Wikipedia quotes David Rockwell telling the family that a new product programme would work only as part of a new creative foundation “based on a fresher, younger approach, encompassing architecture, interior design and graphic design.”

The company has remained with the founding family. Wikipedia says Meijer is headquartered in Walker, Michigan, a suburb of Grand Rapids, and that its co-chairmen, the brothers Hank and Doug Meijer, are Hendrik’s grandsons. It operates in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Design and documentation.

A supermarket brand reaches people through more than a logo. The name on the fascia above the entrance, the lettering on the trolley bays and the colour of the car-park signs are often the first parts of the identity a visitor sees, and they are built to be read from a distance, in daylight and after dark.

Inside, the same identity has to work at a much smaller scale: on aisle markers, shelf-edge labels, department headers and the uniforms of the staff. Those pieces are usually planned as a system, with a fixed set of colours, a limited number of typefaces and rules for how the logo sits beside signs that change every week.

The identity then leaves the store on shopping bags and receipts, and on the packaging of the chain’s own-label ranges, where the retailer’s name or a separate sub-brand appears on everything from cans to cartons. Each guide below sets out who founded the chain, who owns it now and how its name and mark have changed over time, separating what independent sources record from what the company says about itself.

A Dutch boy, a thrift name and a surname.

Meijer’s identity has moved from a description to a mascot to a surname. The early store names — North Side Grocery, Thrift Market — said where the shop was and what it promised. From 1942 the family name joined them on the sign as Meijer’s Thrift Super Market, and in the 1980s the family name stood alone over the door of the big Thrifty Acres stores.

In between came a character. Supermarket News says that in 1949 Meijer adopted a cartoon figure of a little Dutch boy named “Thrifty” as its icon, and used him for the next thirty years. The 1962 name Thrifty Acres carried the same word, thrifty, onto the combined stores, and the family’s Dutch connection has continued in other ways: Wikipedia records a 2006 Meijer gift to Calvin College in Grand Rapids to fund the Frederik Meijer Chair of Dutch Language and Culture.

The 2003 overhaul brought a store designer and an advertising agency in within the same year, Wikipedia says, alongside a new logo, and the approach Rockwell described took in architecture, interiors and graphic design together.

For a design guide, Meijer shows how a regional retailer can carry one founder’s values through a sequence of names — a neighbourhood shop name, a thrift name, a cartoon mascot and finally the family surname — without changing hands. Compare it with Kroger, the chain that would not rent the empty Greenville building in 1934, and Aldi, another family-founded grocer built on thrift. For this guide we use Delft blue, tulip red and clog white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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