Biltema Brand Guidelines: A 1963 Linköping Basement Mail-Order Firm for Car Parts

Car parts by post from a basement in Linköping.

Biltema started with car parts and a postal address. Swedish Wikipedia says Sten-Åke Lindholm founded the business in 1963 as a mail-order company, later adding shop sales, in a basement on Vistvägen in Linköping, under the name Handelsbolaget BIL-TEMA. English Wikipedia describes the early trade as mail-order sales of automotive parts and accessories, with a small shop added in the same basement after about a year.

The idea was to buy straight from the factory. In April 2019 the SVT investigative programme Uppdrag granskning described the founder selling cheap spare parts bought directly from manufacturers, without middlemen, from the Vistvägen basement, and said customers came from across the country. The company tells the same story on its own history page: Lindholm, it says, asked why car parts and accessories cost so much, concluded that cutting out the links between maker and buyer would lower the price, and began marking products with the Biltema name, in part to avoid trademark disputes with sole agents. It says the line “Varför betala mer?”, Swedish for “why pay more?”, appeared in its first catalogue.

That buying policy, English Wikipedia says, led the company to find out where its products were actually made, and in the late 1970s it began building sourcing contacts around the world. The company says it now has purchasing offices in several countries in Europe and Asia.

The first big move came in 1976. Swedish and English Wikipedia and the company all say Biltema left the basement that year for new premises at Torvinge in Linköping. The company gives the new site as 6,000 square metres, holding mail-order handling, a central warehouse and a shop of almost 250 square metres, which was enlarged to about 2,700 square metres in the early 1980s.

Across the Nordic borders, one country at a time.

Biltema went abroad in the early 1980s. Its second store, and its first outside Sweden, opened in Norway in 1983, according to Swedish and English Wikipedia and the company; Finland followed in 1985, and the first Danish store opened in 2002, the company says. In October 2026 the Norwegian site Dagens.no, citing Biltema’s own website, gave the Norwegian count as 67 stores and said that made Norway the country with the most Biltema stores.

The way the stores are run has changed. Swedish Wikipedia says sales were handled until 2011 by a network of franchised stores and mail-order companies, and that since 2011 Biltema has owned all of its Swedish stores; the company’s timeline dates the start of franchise-run stores to 2000. Swedish Wikipedia says the chain works with two store sizes, of 4,000 and 6,000 square metres, and that the range now runs to more than 25,000 articles across car, building, leisure, home, boat, bicycle, tools, technology and chemicals.

The supply chain moved south. The company says it opened a large central warehouse in Halmstad in 2007, with room for about 110,000 pallets, and that it moved its head office to Helsingborg in 2012. Swedish Wikipedia gave the store total as 161 in 2023; the company now describes about 160 stores across its four Nordic countries.

Not every site has opened. In November 2026 the motoring site Carup reported that Biltema had been trying since 2001 to open a store in Östersund, that a court had stopped the detailed plan for its chosen plot in 2018, and that the municipality was now comparing proposals from several companies for the same land.

Food is part of the visit. The company runs Biltema Café in its stores, with a menu that runs from sandwiches and home cooking to sausages and coffee and cakes.

How the chains present themselves.

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 name on the product, a catalogue in every letterbox.

The catalogue carried Biltema’s identity for most of its history. Swedish Wikipedia says it came out twice a year, in spring-summer and autumn-winter editions, and that about 14 million copies were printed across the Nordic countries. The company says the mail-order business was closed in 2003, and that in 2022 it decided to stop distributing the printed catalogue in favour of digital marketing.

The name does much of the work. Because the company chose to mark its goods with its own name, by its account, the word Biltema appears on the products as well as on the store fronts, and the shop name and the own label are the same.

Ownership has been kept private. English Wikipedia says the company is owned by its founder through the Dutch company Biltema BV. Swedish Wikipedia says the Nordic businesses are owned by the Dutch company Biltema Holding BV, which is in turn owned by the Hong Kong company Birgma Holding Ltd, and in April 2019 Uppdrag granskning reported that ownership had moved from the Netherlands to Birgma Holding in Hong Kong.

The company’s corporate page lists the businesses that sit around the stores: Biltema Logistics AB, property companies in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark under the Biltema Real Estate name, Biltema Nordic Services AB, and store companies for each of the four countries. Swedish Wikipedia says Biltema Logistics runs the central warehouse in Halmstad.

The company marked its sixtieth year in 2023, according to its timeline.

For a design guide, Biltema shows how a retailer’s name can double as its own label, printed on the goods, the catalogue and the store alike. Compare Jula, another Swedish chain that grew out of mail order, and Byggmax. For this guide we use a deep blue, an ink blue and a warm yellow with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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