BOMAG Brand Guidelines: Boppard’s 1957 Roller Maker and Its 2012 Fayat Logo

An engineer, a double garage and a vibrating roller.

BOMAG is an abbreviation of Bopparder Maschinenbau-Gesellschaft, the company founded in 1957 in Boppard, on the Rhine, by Karl Heinz Schwamborn. English Wikipedia names him from period sources, among them a 1975 annual filing that calls him the company’s founder and president. German Wikipedia, citing a 2001 history of Boppard, says he started in a double garage opposite the town’s goods station. The company’s own history records the founding and the reason for it.

That reason was the BW 60, a double vibratory roller with drive on all drums, which BOMAG calls the world’s first and “a revolution in compaction technology.” The larger BW 200, which the company calls the world’s first 7-tonne double vibratory roller, followed. BOMAG and English Wikipedia date it to 1962, while German Wikipedia places it three years after the founding. BOMAG says the BW 200 stayed in production until 1993, more than 30 years.

Foreign branches came early. BOMAG lists Austria in 1961, Great Britain in 1967, Japan and Canada in 1968, the USA in 1970 and France in 1978. In 1969 the company moved to the Hellerwald industrial area outside the town, which is still its headquarters, on a site BOMAG now puts at over 300,000 square metres. BOMAG says it decided in 1972 to build a research and development centre; German Wikipedia places the centre six years after the 1970 sale of the company.

A universal logo, and an operator’s screen.

The most useful fact for a design reader is a plain one, and BOMAG states it itself. It introduced a new corporate logo at the start of 2012, and its history gives the reason: the French parent wanted “a universal logo for all company groups and subsidiaries worldwide,” which would promote a sense of community among subsidiaries.

The Spanish trade site Interempresas reported on 23 April 2012 that Fayat had carried a new logo since that January and used the Intermat 2012 show to raise its visibility, aiming at a more unified picture of the group. The same month, KHL’s Construction Briefing reported, in an article dated 18 April 2012, that Fayat’s road building machines, including rollers, paver finishers, planers, stabilisers and light equipment, would go under one global brand, BOMAG. That followed a change made in October 2006, when BOMAG says it took over responsibility for milling machines and pavers from the Fayat company Marini, including their production and technical development.

BOMAG’s history records design awards from 2008. It says several of its products received the iF design award and the red dot award in 2008. In February 2023 it reported that myCOCKPIT, an operating concept for tandem rollers with a choice of touchscreen, rotary pushbutton or joystick, had won a 2023 German Design Award in the categories Excellent Product Design and Human Machine Interface, and it named the agencies Loew Design and Create Next as design partners. In May 2022 it reported that its BM 2000/65 cold planer had won first prize in the heavy category of the French Grand Prix Matériels.

Its lines are on record too. “Think Further” was the line BOMAG used at bauma 2018, where it showed the ROBOMAG autonomous tandem roller as a technology study developed with the Technical University of Kaiserslautern. Its website now carries the line “Millions of kilometres bear our signature.”

Machines, sites and trade fairs.

Road and concrete machinery rarely sits still for a portrait, so its makers tend to photograph it at work. Catalogues and trade-press images return to a few scenes: a paver laying a black mat at dusk under its own lights, a line of tandem rollers working in formation behind it, a milling drum shown in close-up with its picks exposed, a screed drawn in cutaway so the parts that shape the surface can be seen. The subject is the finished road as much as the machine that lays it.

Concrete makers have their own set pieces. A truck-mounted pump is shown with its boom unfolded over a high-rise site, section by section, so that the vehicle reads as a piece of the building work. Truck mixers are lined up in brand colours, and the drum becomes a large painted surface for a maker’s colours.

Trade fairs are the other stage. bauma, now held in Munich, dates from 1949 and last opened in April 2025; CONEXPO-CON/AGG and World of Concrete both meet in Las Vegas, and INTERMAT in Paris has run under that name since 1988. Machines are launched at these shows, and a fair can date a whole generation of a range: Vögele, for one, presented its “Dash 2” pavers at Bauma 2007.

Behind that shared visual language, ownership has changed. Family firms have been bought and brought together, and several of the names in this guide now belong to larger groups, and each entry sets out who founded the brand, who owns it today, where it says its machines are made and what can be documented about how it looks.

A run of owners, then France.

BOMAG’s founder did not keep it long. In 1970 Schwamborn sold the company to Koehring of Milwaukee, a purchase BOMAG says opened the American market. Later owners followed. A report by the trade publisher KHL from the time of the next sale says BOMAG’s “long-time owner” was United Dominion, and that it became part of SPX Corporation when SPX acquired United Dominion in May 2001.

The French Fayat Group agreed to buy BOMAG from SPX, with the transaction expected to close before the end of 2004, KHL reported; a follow-up KHL item said financial close had been reached. BOMAG and Fayat both date the takeover to 2004, while English and German Wikipedia give 2005. Fayat, which BOMAG’s site says was also founded in 1957, is a privately held French group, and BOMAG’s page on it says the company is independent of the capital market.

Under Fayat the business widened. BOMAG says that in 2013 it took over several Terex production lines in North America, including the CMI and Cedarapids products such as pavers and recyclers, and in 2015 moved its US plant from Kewanee, Illinois, to Ridgeway, South Carolina. In China, where BOMAG says it signed its first licence in 1986, it set up BOMAG China at Fengxian in 2002 and later moved the factory to Changzhou. The group’s other brands have also grown: Interempresas reported in January 2017 that Fayat had agreed to buy Atlas Copco’s road construction equipment division, known as Dynapac, and Power Progress reported on 3 March 2025 that it had signed an agreement to acquire Mecalac.

BOMAG’s own figures today are more than 2,400 employees, 250 products, 11 foreign subsidiaries and over 400 dealers and sales networks in about 150 countries. It lists five production sites: Boppard in Germany, Alfonsine in Italy, Changzhou in China, Ridgeway in the USA and Pune in India. German Wikipedia records a drum factory opened at Boppard in June 2013. The product range covers compaction of soil, asphalt and refuse, with stabilisers, recyclers, cold planers and pavers alongside. BOMAG dates its ASPHALT MANAGER compaction control system to 2001, and German Wikipedia to about 1991; the BTM 01 Terrameter of 1983 was an earlier system for checking compaction during rolling, the company says.

For a design guide, BOMAG shows what happens to a town’s abbreviation when it passes through a sequence of owners: the letters stay, and the group sets the logo. Compare Dynapac, a sister brand in the same group, and HAMM, a Bavarian roller maker that sits inside the Wirtgen Group. For this guide we use black, yellow and dark ochre with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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