Bricomarché Brand Guidelines: A 1979 Mousquetaires DIY Banner, Logimarché and Bricorama

A grocery group’s move into DIY in 1979.

Bricomarché was created in 1979 by the Groupement Les Mousquetaires, the French retail group behind Intermarché. French Wikipedia gives the date as 6 January 1979 and describes the chain as specialised in equipment for the home: DIY, decoration and gardening, with pet departments in some stores. Polish Wikipedia, citing the group’s Polish website, places the first store at Châteaudun, in the Eure-et-Loir. English Wikipedia also dates the founding to 1979.

The banner belongs to a group with an unusual structure. French Wikipedia says the Mousquetaires group was founded on 15 September 1969 by Jean-Pierre Le Roch and has its head office at Bondoufle, in the Essonne. Its stores are run by adhérents: independent business owners who each hold at least a majority of the company that runs their store. The holding company ITM Entreprises owns the group’s banners, including Intermarché, Netto, Bricomarché, Bricorama and Brico Cash, and licenses them to those store companies, according to the same article, and each owner also gives part of their time to the group’s shared functions, such as purchasing, advertising and logistics bases. The Autorité de la concurrence, France’s competition authority, described ITM Équipement de la Maison, a subsidiary of ITM Entreprises, as the company that operates the Bricomarché and Brico Cash chains in December 2017.

The banner added formats over time. French Wikipedia says the group created Logimarché in 1998 for rural areas, with stores of 540 to 800 square metres, and that it took the Bricomarché name on 15 February 2007; English Wikipedia dates the replacement of Logimarché by Bricomarché to October 2008, so the sources differ. French Wikipedia also says the group launched Brico Cash, a discount DIY format, in 2010.

Four departments, services and an eastern network.

Bricomarché sells building materials and tools alongside decoration and garden goods. English Wikipedia lists its lines as decorating, DIY, materials, gardening and pet products, and describes stores of 1,500 to 2,300 square metres. French Wikipedia says the group created its own product range, Guidéal, in 2012.

The chain went abroad in the late 1990s. French Wikipedia says the first Portuguese store opened in 1998 and the first Polish store in 2000; Polish Wikipedia places that first Polish store at Żary and names ITM Polska as the network’s operator, with a purchasing centre at Swadzim near Poznań. In 2000, French Wikipedia adds, the Mousquetaires and the German group Hagebau set up the A.R.E.N.A. alliance to pool non-food purchasing.

Poland became a large part of the network. The Polish retail trade site dlahandlu.pl reported in December 2020 that Bricomarché had 171 stores in Poland, against 163 at the end of 2019, after openings in Świnoujście, Gostynin and Bytów. It said the stores offered about 25,000 products across four main departments — DIY, building, decoration and garden — with pet products and plants in some locations, and that depending on the store customers could have worktops and boards cut, doors trimmed, sinks cut out and orders delivered. The average sales area was over 1,700 square metres, it said, with outdoor garden areas and covered building-materials yards at some sites. Polish Wikipedia adds that the Polish network tested collection lockers, called Bricomaty, from February 2020.

Formats, ranges and owners.

French home, culture, organic and city-grocery chains tend to present themselves through the shop before anything else. The store format carries the identity: the edge-of-town retail park with its large single sign, the town-centre supermarket with a narrow shopfront, the neighbourhood grocer on a street corner, or the specialist shop built around loose goods and counters. Many of these companies publish their formats on their own sites, with store counts, opening dates and maps that change from year to year, so any figure in a guide like this one is given with the date of the source.

Print and own label do much of the remaining work. Furniture and home chains publish catalogues and seasonal collections; grocery and organic retailers sell ranges under their own names, with packaging rules that the companies describe in their own words; culture chains organise shelves, workshops and events around books, music and hobbies. Campaigns appear in the French trade press, which usually names the agency, the photographer and the poster network, and those reports are a better record of a brand’s voice than any slogan.

Structure matters as much as style. Several of these names are cooperatives, buying groups or family-controlled holdings rather than single companies: shops may be run by independent members or franchisees under a shared charter, while a central body handles buying, logistics and advertising. Others sit inside larger listed or private groups and have changed hands more than once. Corporate pages on founders and owners, and the official French business register, set out who runs the network and where it is based.

Not every story is one of steady growth. French retail has seen receiverships, rescue plans, sales of store networks and closures, decided by commercial courts and reported with dates. Planning decisions on new stores are taken by departmental and national commissions. Where those events belong to a brand’s history, this series states them plainly, with dates and outcomes.

Bricorama joins the group, and a third logo.

The group widened its DIY business in 2017. On 18 October 2017 ITM Équipement de la Maison notified the Autorité de la concurrence of its plan to acquire Bricorama France, Bricorama Méditerranée and Bricorama Asia. In decision 17-DCC-215 of 18 December 2017 the authority cleared the deal after its first-phase review, subject to commitments to sell five Bricorama stores to a competitor and to end one Bricorama franchise agreement, because it found the deal could otherwise have raised prices in several local catchment areas. It found no problem in the upstream market for buying from suppliers, given the combined group’s limited share of the national market, and said the required sales meant those stores would change retailer rather than close. RetailDetail reported on 5 January 2018 that the purchase had been finalised, adding about 160 Bricorama stores to the 560 Bricomarché and Brico Cash stores in France, together with Bricorama’s Spanish business and its purchasing office in Asia.

The visual identity has been redrawn twice in the period French Wikipedia records. It shows a logo used from 1994 to 17 May 2009, a second from 17 May 2009 to 2 January 2023, and the current mark since 2 January 2023. Citing Franchise Magazine, it says the 2009 change came with the banner’s thirtieth anniversary and a new store concept, and that the identity kept its red and black colours. Logimarché and Brico Cash each had a logo of their own.

For a design guide, Bricomarché shows how a banner held by a group of independent owners can keep one name and colour scheme across absorbed formats and several countries. Compare Intermarché, the Mousquetaires grocery banner, and Leroy Merlin, another French home-improvement chain. For this guide we use a workshop red, a charcoal and a timber tone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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