Åhléns Brand Guidelines: An 1899 Insjön Mail-Order Firm and Its Red Å Over Stockholm

A mail-order catalogue from a village in Dalarna.

Åhléns began as a mail-order business. The company, English Wikipedia and Swedish Wikipedia all say it was founded in 1899 by Johan Petter Åhlén and Erik Holm in Insjön, a small town in the province of Dalarna, under the name Åhlén & Holm. Swedish Wikipedia adds that Holm left the firm early, but the name was kept.

The first catalogue, the company says, came out in the year of founding and listed 272 articles. Both Wikipedia versions say the first item the firm sold was a printed portrait of the royal family, which went on to sell more than 100,000 copies; Swedish Wikipedia names postcards, popular for collecting and swapping, as another early success. It also says the related publishing house Åhlén & Åkerlund issued a Christmas magazine, Julstämning, from 1906, with contributions from artists and writers such as Carl Larsson, Anders Zorn and Albert Engström, and that an English edition followed in 1912. The company says it grew in its first five years from sending 290 parcels a year to just over 50,000, and Swedish Wikipedia notes that the local post office moved into Åhlén & Holm’s premises in October 1906 to handle the volume. After ten years, by the company’s account, the business had 255 employees.

In 1915 the firm moved to Stockholm. Swedish Wikipedia says Åhlén had a seven-storey main building put up on Ringvägen, designed by the architect Edvard Bernhard and opened on 15 November 1915. Its globe-shaped clock and its tower carrying a red “Å” survive, and Swedish Wikipedia calls them a characteristic part of the Stockholm cityscape. A second building alongside it on Götgatan was finished on 1 May 1929, Swedish Wikipedia says, giving the company about 22,000 square metres. That tower letter is the closest thing to a documented visual signature in the brand’s history.

In the 1930s, after a study trip to the United States, Åhlén added a chain of low-price shops. Swedish Wikipedia dates the first Tempo store to 22 October 1932, at Östermalmstorg in Stockholm. His son Gösta Åhlén then ran the company as chief executive until 1969.

From Tempo to Åhléns, and from one owner to another.

The catalogue that started the business did not last. Swedish Wikipedia says the mail-order operation stopped at the turn of 1961 and 1962, and the company concentrated on the Tempo chain. On 9 September 1964 it opened Åhléns City on Klarabergsgatan in central Stockholm, close to T-Centralen, designed by the architects Backström & Reinius. The company still calls it its flagship store.

The chain changed shape over the next two decades. Swedish Wikipedia says Tempo was merged with Epa in the 1970s and that the department store NK belonged to the group from 1976 to 1983. In 1985 every store was renamed Åhléns, according to both Wikipedia versions, and Resumé marked that rebranding with archive photographs in 2021.

In 1988 the company was taken over by Axel Johnson AB, and it stayed in that group until 2022. Swedish Wikipedia says Åhléns bought the beauty chain KICKS in 2002 and the home-accessories chain Lagerhaus in 2004, and that both were separate from Åhléns AB by 2017.

Online selling came in two attempts. Resumé reported in March 2021 that Åhléns launched e-commerce as early as 2000, closed it soon after because the market was not ready, and did not have a new web shop in place until 2016. The same article said the number of department stores had fallen from 69 in 2016 to 55, and described a pilot at Fridhemsplan in Stockholm where other businesses, including Joe & The Juice and Indiska, had opened inside an Åhléns store as part of what the company called a “marketplace.”

Resumé also traced the brand’s advertising through the 2010s: work with We Are Group from 2011 to 2013, a change of direction with the agency Forsman & Bodenfors from 2014, a later campaign concept with the same agency, “Ha det fint,” and then a move to the agency Tillsammans.

Nordic beauty and discount retail.

Nordic hardware, electronics, discount and beauty retailers are met in several places at once: in large warehouse stores on the edge of town, in city-centre shops, on web shops and, for many years, in printed catalogues pushed through letterboxes. Several of the chains in this series began by selling through the post, and their histories describe the catalogue as the main way customers found products before the store network and the web shop took over that role.

The store fascia is where most of these identities are fixed. The names are usually short and written as plain lettering across a large building, and price signs and offer labels inside the stores carry much of the day-to-day visual weight. Some chains place their own name on the goods as well as on the building, so that the retailer and its own label read as one.

Store and range naming is generally descriptive. Formats, outlets, customer clubs and sub-brands tend to add a plain word to the parent name, and own-label ranges are described by what they are for: tools, garden, car care, home or skin care. In this series we describe those ranges by the names the companies publish, without judging one against another.

The corporate side is part of the public face too. Some of these businesses are family-owned groups that have added property, logistics or hotel companies around the stores; others are listed on Nordic exchanges or sit inside larger international groups. Their own pages on founders, owners and listings are read here alongside dated independent reporting, and the palettes shown are our own unofficial interpretations, not company colour standards.

A department store under new ownership.

On 29 June 2022, Axel Johnson announced the sale of Åhléns. SVT and Svenska Dagbladet both reported that day that the deal covered 47 department stores together with Åhléns Outlet and Designtorget, and that the new majority owner was Axcent of Scandinavia, led by Ayad Al-Saffar, whose group also owns the watch and jewellery chain Ur & Penn. SVT reported that New Wave founder Torsten Jansson and Göran Härstedt took minority stakes. The price was not disclosed. The company’s own English page confirms that Åhléns AB was taken over by Ayad Al-Saffar in 2022, and the Norwegian trade site Netthandel, carrying an Ehandel.se report in November 2026, described him as the chain’s chief executive and owner.

Store numbers have changed over time. Swedish Wikipedia gives 62 department stores in Sweden in June 2018 and 50 as of January 2025, Åhléns City among them. The company describes its stores today as a mix of its own brands and international names across three business areas: Fashion (Mode), Beauty (Skönhet) and Home (Hem).

The visual thread across all of this is thin but specific: a founder’s surname with a Swedish ring letter, and a red Å on a tower that has stood over Ringvägen since 1915.

For a design guide, Åhléns shows how a retail name can carry more than a century of change, from village catalogue to city department store, while keeping one letter at its centre. Compare Stockmann, the Helsinki department store, and KICKS, the beauty chain Åhléns once owned. For this guide we use tower red, catalogue cream and soot with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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