Altex Brand Guidelines: The Piatra Neamț Chain Behind Media Galaxy and Brico

Second-hand televisions and a first shop.

Altex is a Romanian electronics and home-appliance retailer that grew out of one entrepreneur’s trade in second-hand televisions. Romanian Wikipedia says the business began in 1991, when Dan Ostahie started importing used televisions from Switzerland, which were repaired and sold in Romania; Mobilissimo reported in September 2026 that he went into business straight after finishing university. The company, Altex România, was founded in 1992 in Piatra Neamț, the town in the north-east of the country where, Ziarul Financiar noted in 2004, Ostahie was born. Forbes România, profiling him in its business hall of fame in December 2018, said the first ALTEX store opened in Piatra Neamț that same year.

Growth in the 1990s was fast and then uneven. Forbes România wrote that between 1994 and 1997 the business opened more than 50 stores in the country’s main cities; Romanian Wikipedia puts the network at more than 60 shops during the decade. It also says that the economic conditions of 1996, with high inflation and expensive credit, pushed the company to shrink the network and restructure, and that expansion resumed and accelerated after 2002. That was the year the online shop altex.ro opened, according to Mobilissimo.

By then Altex sat inside a wider group. Ziarul Financiar described Ostahie in July 2004 as founder and chairman of the Altex Group, which included the retail chain, the logistics and transport company 8TIM, the wholesale distributor Italromtex and Complet Electro Serv, a service and IT-systems company. The paper named the chain’s main domestic competitors at the time as Cosmo, Domo and Flanco, alongside international retailers such as Metro, Carrefour, Selgros and Cora.

Media Galaxy, a downturn and a hundredth store.

The second banner arrived in 2004. Romanian Wikipedia says Altex introduced Media Galaxy as a large-store format, opening the first one in February 2004 in București Mall with roughly 3,000 square metres of floor space; Ziarul Financiar reported that summer that Media Galaxy stores were trading in Bucharest and Cluj. Media Galaxy was developed for stores of several thousand square metres, the same source says, while the Altex chain took in a wider spread of sizes and sites.

The downturn of 2008–2009 forced another round of change. Romanian Wikipedia says the company closed, moved or resized shops and turned some Media Galaxy units into Altex stores; the Media Galaxy in Unirea Shopping Center, one of the largest at about 6,000 square metres, closed in January 2009. The same source counts 95 Altex and Media Galaxy stores in 2013, 14 of them Media Galaxy, and 109 stores with more than 120,000 square metres of selling space at the start of 2016. The 100th Altex store opened in October 2018, it says, and by 2024 the two banners together had more than 135 stores.

Shops and screens were joined up early. Romanian Wikipedia dates the company’s omnichannel strategy, linking its stores with its e-commerce sites, to 2014, and Mobilissimo reported that Altex has run its own marketplace since 2022. Behind the shops, the company began building its own logistics centre at Dragomirești-Vale, near Bucharest, in 2018; Forbes România described it that December as two main warehouse buildings covering 90,000 square metres, with a further 46,000 square metres of outdoor platforms. Among its own-label goods is Myria, a brand Romanian Wikipedia says Altex uses for IT, electronics, home appliances and accessories.

The company has faced one notable consumer-agency case. In November 2021 Romania’s consumer-protection authority, ANPC, fined Altex after finding that more than 1,000 products promoted online as reduced during its Black Friday campaign did not show discounts measured against the reference price the law requires, Romanian Wikipedia says; ANPC also proposed suspending the company’s website, then lifted that measure two days later once the company had corrected how discounts were displayed.

How the region’s chains present themselves.

The consumer-electronics chains of France, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania and Greece sell many of the same televisions, phones, laptops and washing machines, so their identities do much of the work of telling them apart. The shop sign, the logo and the colour scheme are the parts each company controls and publishes itself, on its corporate site, its store fronts and its online shop, and they are the starting point for this series.

Store formats vary from chain to chain. The companies in this series describe formats ranging from large out-of-town stores to smaller shops in city centres and shopping centres, alongside their online shops. Some run every store themselves; others mix directly run stores with affiliated stores owned by independent retailers.

Ownership shapes each brand as well. Some chains are listed companies, some belong to larger retail groups that run several banners, and others are independent retailers joined together in buying associations such as Expert, founded in 1967, whose members trade either under the shared name or under their own banners.

Corporate pages add their own layer: histories of founders and owners, own-label ranges, loyalty schemes and advertising claims, each presented in the company’s own words. In the guides that follow, those claims are attributed to the companies that make them, and the colours and typefaces shown are our own unofficial interpretation rather than any chain’s official specification.

A founder-run group with three banners.

Altex has stayed in its founder’s hands. Romanian Wikipedia describes the company as controlled by Dan Ostahie, with its head office in Voluntari, just north of Bucharest, and Mobilissimo reported in September 2026 that the group has used acquisitions mainly to buy know-how rather than simply to absorb rivals. In 2015, as the competitor Domo cut back its network, Altex took over five of its store locations, the site reported. Through Complet Electro Serv it bought the business-supplies company RTC Proffice Experience from Oresa Ventures, which announced in March 2020 that it was part of the Altex group, and in the same year took 79 percent of the IT distributor Despec România.

The next step took Altex into home improvement. At the end of 2024 Altex agreed with the British group Kingfisher to buy its Brico Dépôt operations in Romania, including the store network, distribution and head office; Romanian Wikipedia says the Competition Council authorised the deal in April 2025 and that it was completed in May 2025. In October 2025 the company that had run Brico Dépôt Romania was merged into Altex România, and in September 2026 Altex announced that the stores would move to the name Brico, a conversion expected to take about six months. Romanian Wikipedia puts the total at about 165 stores across the Altex, Media Galaxy and Brico Dépôt banners. With the furniture retailer Mobexpert, Altex also developed a shared retail site in Bucharest’s Pallady area, where, Mobilissimo reported, an Altex store of about 4,000 square metres opened in September 2025.

For a design guide, Altex shows how a regional shop started in Piatra Neamț became a national name that now carries three banners, each built for a different store size or category. Compare Flanco, which Ziarul Financiar listed among its competitors in 2004, and eMAG, the Romanian online retailer. For this guide we use a deep crimson, a warm charcoal and a pale stone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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