Baby-Walz Brand Guidelines: The Bad Waldsee Mail-Order House That Began With a Baby Catalogue

A layette sent by post.

Baby-Walz began as a mail-order business in Bad Waldsee, in Upper Swabia, in southern Germany. German Wikipedia says Alfons Walz founded Versandhaus Walz there in 1952, starting with the mail-order sale of a first outfit for newborn babies and publishing the first catalogue under the name baby-walz. The 1952 date is repeated by the regional newspaper Schwäbische Zeitung, which in April 2025 described the group as “founded in 1952.” In a 2017 report the same paper quoted the company as saying the mail-order house in Bad Waldsee had grown up in the 1950s.

Sources differ slightly on when the catalogue business itself began. German Wikipedia says the baby-walz catalogue first appeared in 1952 and still appears as a “magalog,” a cross between magazine and catalogue; the trade paper TextilWirtschaft, in May 2006, dated the catalogue business to 1965. Both are given here.

The company widened its range in the 1960s. According to German Wikipedia, a second catalogue, Die moderne Hausfrau (“the modern housewife”), with products for the household, kitchen and garden, followed in 1967, and two years later, in 1969, the first baby-walz store opened at the company’s headquarters in Bad Waldsee. More stores followed in Germany, Austria and Switzerland over the following decades.

German Wikipedia writes the brand in lower case, as baby-walz, while the regional and trade press write Baby-Walz or Baby Walz; this guide uses Baby-Walz throughout.

From Neckermann to Alteri.

Baby-Walz has had several owners. German Wikipedia says Versandhaus Walz was sold in 1988 to the mail-order company Neckermann, which later became part of the KarstadtQuelle group and its successor, Arcandor. TextilWirtschaft confirmed the link in 2006, describing Walz as a subsidiary of Neckermann Versand AG within KarstadtQuelle.

After Arcandor’s insolvency, German Wikipedia says, the business was taken over by the Puccini Group, which belonged to the private-equity firm Carlyle. After Puccini in turn became insolvent, the Walz group was sold to Alteri Investors, an offshoot of Apollo Global Management, in March 2015. The Schwäbische Zeitung confirmed in April 2025 that the British financial investor Alteri had owned the group since 2015.

The 2000s brought a phase of store openings. TextilWirtschaft reported in May 2006 that a Baby-Walz store would open in Weil am Rhein on 11 May and that the chain’s 28th store, of about 780 square metres, would follow in Magdeburg on 1 June; in June 2006 it reported a 29th store, in the Atrium shopping centre in Bamberg, opening on 6 July. The paper said Walz ran all its stores itself, and that its catalogue reached Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. It also quoted the company’s description of itself as Europe’s largest specialist mail-order house for pregnancy and baby goods, a claim given here only as the company’s own.

Online selling came next. German Wikipedia says the group began building web shops for baby-walz and Die moderne Hausfrau from 2000, and added a third brand, walzvital, for older customers and care needs, in 2005. Today Versandhaus Walz groups the subsidiaries baby-walz GmbH and Walz Leben & Wohnen GmbH, plus a marketing arm, according to the same article.

There were harder years. In December 2012 the Schwäbische Zeitung reported that about 200 full-time posts had been cut at Walz that year, and that the group’s logistics, including those of Baby-Walz, would stay in Bad Waldsee after staff agreed to longer working hours.

Design and documentation.

Baby and nursery store chains in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the United States and Australia sell to families at the same moment in life, but each presents itself in its own way. The shop sign and logo are the first point of contact, and the same name is carried onto catalogues and websites; Mothercare’s history page, for example, shows its catalogues from 1962 onwards beside shopfronts from Kingston in 1961 to Plymouth in 2018. Colour schemes are each company’s own choice.

Store formats run from large nursery superstores to high-street shops and shop-in-shop counters inside other retailers. Mothercare describes a range from small shop-in-shop units to mid-sized high-street stores and larger out-of-town or shopping-mall stores, while PRG Retail Group describes Prénatal’s Italian network as a mix of shops and megastores, including a two-floor store near Milan shared with the Toys Center banner.

Franchising is one route abroad. Mothercare says it began franchising in 1984 and awards one partner per territory, so the same name can appear over stores run by different companies in different countries. Own-label ranges sit beside branded nursery goods, and the companies name and describe those ranges themselves on their websites and in their catalogues.

Corporate pages tell the rest of the story: founders, owners and changes of ownership. Mothercare and Prénatal have both passed through mergers, private-equity ownership or sale, and Mothercare’s British shops closed after its UK arm entered administration in 2019. For a design reader, these pages are a direct record of how a name, a sign and a palette have travelled through those changes.

A catalogue brand with stores.

Bad Waldsee remains the centre of the business. In January 2017 the Schwäbische Zeitung visited the site and reported, from the company’s guides, that up to 20,000 parcels a day ran along a conveyor 500 metres long, that returns from across Germany were gathered in Günzburg before being brought to Bad Waldsee, and that the Baby-Walz store at the headquarters had been renovated in December 2016. The company then gave its staff as 1,350 across sites in Germany, Austria and Switzerland; by April 2025 the paper put the group’s workforce at about 1,000. German Wikipedia gives the store estate as about 20 shops, without a date.

In April 2025 the Schwäbische Zeitung reported that Versandhaus Walz had agreed to take over Babymarkt, an online retailer of baby and children’s goods based in Bochum, from Tengelmann Ventures. Under the plan, only Babymarkt’s online trade in its core markets would continue, under Walz’s management, while its Bochum headquarters, its three stores and its logistics centre would close; Tengelmann Ventures was to take a minority stake in Versandhaus Walz. The deal was subject to competition clearance, with completion expected in May 2025, the paper said. The e-commerce analysts ECDB reported that baby-walz.de and babymarkt.com would remain separate websites under the same parent.

Baby-Walz began as a catalogue brand and added stores around it. Its long history in print, from a first catalogue to a magalog, sits alongside the web shops that German Wikipedia dates from 2000, and alongside a store estate that TextilWirtschaft tracked as it grew in 2006.

For a design guide, Baby-Walz shows how a regional mail-order name can carry one lower-case brand from a catalogue to stores and web shops across several countries. Compare BabyOne, another German baby retailer, and Vertbaudet. For this guide we use a teal, a deep pine and a soft apricot with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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