Allard Brand Guidelines: Camp Scandinavia, ToeOFF and a Helsingborg Family Group

From a corset salon to an American licence.

Allard is the international name of a Swedish orthotics group whose Scandinavian business still trades as Camp Scandinavia. Its own history, published on the Camp Scandinavia website, traces the company back to 1925 and AB Germa, a corset salon that made and sold shapewear and underwear.

In the early 1950s, the company says, Germa changed direction. It began working with orthopaedic doctors and turned its product development and production toward support corsets. That brought it into contact with Camp, an American company that made functional corsets mainly for orthopaedic use. In 1954 a licence agreement was signed under which Germa made the corsets under licence from S.H. Camp, while a newly formed company, Camp Scandinavia AB, handled distribution and sales.

Fashion then changed the business. The late 1960s brought tights and, in the company’s words, women’s liberation, and with them less demand for corsets as shapewear or for holding up stockings. Germa wound down its shapewear and underwear during 1972, keeping the orthopaedic support corsets; it remained the group’s corset-making unit until 1995. New products such as neck collars and arm slings followed.

In 1972 Camp Scandinavia moved to Helsingborg, on the Öresund strait, where it built its head office and warehouse; it is still there. It opened a Danish company with its own warehouse in 1970 to ease customs clearance across the strait — wound down in 2012, after EU membership and the Öresund Bridge had eased trade across the strait — then a Finnish company in 1979 and a Norwegian one in 1989.

The Allard family and the ToeOFF.

The Allard name entered the story in 1983. That year, the company says, Bertil Allard became managing director just as the then owner sold the Scandinavian business to Camp Inc, turning Camp Scandinavia from a licensee into an American-owned subsidiary limited to the Scandinavian market. The 1980s also brought a distribution partnership with Amoena, the maker of silicone breast forms; when Amoena later left, the loss of what had been a large part of sales led to staff cuts in 1995.

In 1996 Bertil Allard bought the Scandinavian business, and Camp Scandinavia became Swedish-owned again. No longer restricted to its home market, the company began developing products for export. The first was the ToeOFF, an ankle-foot orthosis (AFO) for people with foot drop, launched in 1997. Allard USA describes it as “the first carbon composite AFO.”

The international name itself came from a constraint. The family had the right to use the long-established Camp name in Scandinavia but not elsewhere, the company says, so in 2003 it introduced Allard International as its brand for other markets. Allard International now handles sales through distributors in more than 30 countries, outside the markets where the group has its own subsidiaries in Scandinavia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Composite AFOs remain the core of the group’s engineering, and its patents are public. On February 13, 2018, the US patent office granted Camp Scandinavia AB a patent titled “Orthosis loading management,” with a priority date of October 2013. Its abstract describes fibre-reinforced laminate orthoses, “preferably ankle-foot orthoses,” in which the shape, orientation and position of each layer are arranged to manage how loads travel through the brace — layers with cut-outs, ply drop-offs and tapering. The current range adds the Allard AFO family, carbon footplates and textile orthoses for the hand, wrist and shoulder; in the United States the group also sells the Meracus, a prosthetic foot it describes as made entirely of composite materials.

Orthoses and the clinics that fit them.

Prosthetics and orthotics companies sell to two audiences at once. Their customers are mostly clinicians, the prosthetists and orthotists who measure, cast and fit, and the clinics and health systems that pay; the people who wear the limbs and braces are the ones the pictures are built around. Blatchford’s website, for one, splits into sections for healthcare professionals, with technical documentation, training and clinical papers, and for patients and caregivers.

The imagery follows from that. Product shots often show carbon-fibre feet, knee joints and silicone liners isolated on white, like engineering components, which in part they are. Next to them come people in everyday settings: walking a dog, climbing stairs, at work or at home. Clinic photographs show a clinician kneeling beside a patient to check the alignment of a socket. The language around the pictures is about mobility and independence, often in a short slogan that the company uses as a statement of purpose.

Sport supplies the most dramatic images. Running blades made from carbon fibre have become a visual shorthand for the whole field, and makers put para-athletes in front of the camera; Össur, for one, sponsors a group of them as Team Össur, English Wikipedia says, naming Markus Rehm and Jody Cundy among them. Those pictures sit beside the quieter work of everyday limbs, which make up most of what the trade fits.

The industry also has its own meeting places. OTWorld in Leipzig, a world congress and trade fair held every two years, brought prosthetists, orthotists, manufacturers and researchers together in May 2026 and has announced its next edition for May 2028, with a para-sport activity area among its features. For a designer, the category is a study in balance: precision engineering, clinical trust and personal stories, held together, in several cases, by a founder’s own name.

Support for Better Life.

The group took its present shape in the 2000s. Allard USA was started to build sales of the ToeOFF in America — in 2005 according to the Camp Scandinavia history, while Allard USA’s own page says its market was founded in 2006 and is based in Rockaway, New Jersey. In 2006 Bertil Allard’s son Peter Allard took over and formed the group Allard Support for Better Life; Allard USA describes it as a group of companies solely owned by Peter Allard.

The family then brought manufacturing in-house. In 2007, after its main composite subcontractor went bankrupt, the group bought the business out of bankruptcy and renamed it Allard Manufacturing; the company says the plant now makes everything from foot-drop orthoses to X-ray tables and parts for speedboats. In 2010 it set up Allmay Bodywear in China to make its textile orthoses and acquired Boston Brace Europe in Ireland, where it makes spinal orthoses to individual measurements and scans; that unit became the springboard for Allard UK. The group says it is certified to ISO 13485:2016, ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 14001:2015.

Allard has also moved closer to patients. In 2015 it opened Camp Pro, an orthotics clinic in Sweden, followed in 2016 by Camp Clinic in Finland and Denmark; when it took over Invacare distribution in Finland it set up Camp Mobility for wheelchairs, walkers and other aids. The group says it has about 400 employees, with its global headquarters in Helsingborg.

The brand runs on two names at once — Camp at home, Allard abroad — tied together by one slogan, “Support for Better Life,” which appears on every site in the group.

For a design guide, Allard shows how a company can carry two brand names across markets without losing a single identity. Compare Permobil, another Swedish mobility name, and Rehband, a Swedish support brand. For this guide we use a deep blue, a birch white and a lichen green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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