Bricoman Brand Guidelines: A 1979 Belgian Warehouse, Adeo’s Trade Stores and an Underlined M

A Belgian discount warehouse, sold to a French group.

Bricoman did not begin in France. French Wikipedia says the first Bricoman store was opened in 1979 by the Belgian Louis Delhaize group at Châtelineau, in the province of Hainaut, and that the banner started out as a discount do-it-yourself warehouse. In 1994 it was sold to the Leroy Merlin group, the French home-improvement retailer that was renamed Adeo in 2007. French Wikipedia’s article on Adeo adds that the group left the Belgian market in 2003 and sold the Belgian stores to the Dutch group Vendex KBB, so the name lived on outside the country where it started.

In France, Bricoman was set up as a separate company in 1998; French Wikipedia gives its creation date as 22 October 1998. The sources differ on the first French store. French Wikipedia lists a first warehouse store in Lyon in 1999, while the company’s own key dates, published in October 2025 and quoted by the Italian trade magazine DIY and Garden, give 1998 and a first warehouse store at Massieux.

From France the format spread through the group. French Wikipedia dates the Spanish launch to 2004, under the name Bricomart, with a first store in Seville in 2006; the first Polish store, in Warsaw, to 2007; and the first Italian store to 2008. DIY and Garden reported in February 2022 that the first store the banner opened in Italy was at Elmas, in Sardinia. In Poland, the property title Propertynews.pl, in a report carried by PortalSpozywczy.pl in June 2012, said Bricoman had been in the country since 2007 and that its store in the Warsaw district of Wilanów, opened on 14 June 2012, was its fourth in Poland, with a store in Łódź to follow that August. In Brazil, French Wikipedia says, the group opened its first store in São Paulo on 24 January 2018 under a different name, Obramax.

From discount DIY to the building trade.

The French business changed its customer over time. French Wikipedia says Bricoman France repositioned itself in 2015 as a banner for professionals and has belonged to Adeo’s professional division since 2014. The company’s own October 2025 key dates put the turn in 2017, listing work on the range, team expertise, services for tradespeople, professional counters inside the warehouse stores and a Club M loyalty programme. The change also meant closures: French Wikipedia records that in 2017 Bricoman announced the closure of four French stores, at Sausheim and Brumath in Alsace, at Laval and at Pontault-Combault.

The model is a large warehouse store selling building materials and tools in quantities suited to building sites, with an online marketplace beside it. When DIY International, the German trade title, reported the French renaming in October 2025, it described Bricoman as a professional building-materials chain with 37 locations in France.

The renaming began in Italy. In February 2022 retail&food reported that the chief executive of Bricoman Italia had announced at a press conference that the Italian chain would become Tecnomat, starting with a new store at Assemini, in the province of Cagliari, on 16 March 2022, after which all stores would gradually take the new name. DIY and Garden wrote that the new store replaced the Elmas branch and that the name was meant to evoke “materiali tecnici,” technical materials; DIY International reported the change the same month.

Spain followed a different path. In January 2023 DIY International reported that the Spanish chain Bricomart had changed its name to Obramat in November 2022, to stress materials for construction, “obra” in Spanish, rather than DIY, “brico”; it then had 32 stores in Spain. French Wikipedia’s Adeo article groups Bricoman, Obramat, Obramax and Tecnomat under what it calls the “M brand,” the group’s professional warehouse banners in France, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Italy and Brazil.

Signs, own labels and owners.

European DIY chains and builders’ merchants present themselves first through the building: a large shed on a retail park or industrial estate, with a fascia sign and on-site parking and loading. In the trade press, store openings are reported branch by branch, with the site, the town and the running total, and that branch count is often the main public measure of how a network has grown.

Ownership shapes the identity more than in most retail sectors. Some chains are owned by listed building-materials groups that run several trading names side by side; others are co-operatives or buying groups whose members are independent family firms. In the co-operative model the shared name may sit above the member’s own name rather than replacing it, and store formats are often run as franchises supplied by a central organisation.

Formats are named and graded with care. A group may run a full-size DIY store with a garden centre, a smaller local format, a trade-only warehouse and a merchant yard for builders, each with its own sign but a shared family resemblance. Own-label ranges, hire counters, kitchen design services and click-and-collect services are named by the companies themselves and appear in their store descriptions and opening announcements.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: founders, founding dates, acquisitions and the parent company. The guides in this series set out what dated, independent sources say about each chain — when it began, who owns it and how its network has changed — and keep the companies’ own descriptions clearly marked as theirs.

One letter kept across four names.

France was the last large market to change. In October 2025 the company announced that Bricoman in France would take the Tecnomat name, as in Italy, and DIY International reported that the change would take place in spring 2026. DIY and Garden noted that the underlined “M” would stay as the common graphic element linking the group’s different store names to their origin. French Wikipedia now treats Bricoman as the former name of Tecnomat, says the French stores have carried the Tecnomat name since spring 2026 and gives 37 stores in France in 2026; the old bricoman.fr web address now forwards to the Tecnomat site. Bricoman in France should therefore be read as a name that has been retired, not as a chain still trading under it.

In Poland the Bricoman name was still in use as of August 2025, when ZielonaGospodarka.pl reported a long-term renewable electricity supply contract between the energy group Polenergia and Adeo’s two Polish companies, Leroy Merlin Polska and Bricoman Polska, describing both as part of the Adeo Group. French Wikipedia’s Adeo article also lists Poland as the market where the Bricoman name is used.

The pattern is unusual. One warehouse concept now trades as Tecnomat in Italy and France, Obramat in Spain and Portugal, Obramax in Brazil and Bricoman in Poland, and the one constant the trade press points to is the underlined M.

For a design guide, Bricoman shows how a single letterform can hold a group of banners together while the words around it change from country to country. Compare Leroy Merlin, the Adeo banner that bought Bricoman in 1994, and Weldom, another Adeo store name in France. For this guide we use charcoal, ochre, concrete grey and a rust brown with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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