Clas Ohlson Brand Guidelines: A 1918 Dalarna Mail-Order Firm, Insjön and the Nordic Stores

A bicycle workshop, a printing press and a catalogue.

Clas Ohlson began in 1918 in Dalarna, in central Sweden, and is named after its founder, Clas Ohlson. The company says he set up Clas Ohlson & Co in Insjön that year, and that what began as a bicycle repair shop soon became a mail-order business. Swedish Wikipedia places the very start slightly differently: it says the firm opened in a cottage in the village of Holen, in the parish of Åhl, as a combined bicycle workshop and mail-order seller of technical handbooks, and moved to new premises in Insjön, then a railway-station community, in 1920.

The first things sold were books. English Wikipedia says the business began with manuals and technical literature, which gave people in rural districts access to reading that was otherwise hard to find. Swedish Wikipedia says cameras and electronics entered the catalogue from 1921, the year the bicycle workshop was given up once mail order paid its way, and that electronics, kits and similar goods soon became the main lines.

Insjön stayed the base. Swedish Wikipedia records a new business building put up in 1925 and extended in stages in 1942, 1956 and 1965–1966, followed by a newly built department store in the village in 1971; English Wikipedia dates the first shop in Insjön to 1926. Until the 1980s, Swedish Wikipedia says, mail order remained the company’s main business, built around a printed product catalogue that the company no longer publishes and that has been replaced by its website. A Clas Ohlson museum next to the main store in Insjön shows handbooks and catalogues from the 1920s onwards alongside gramophones, radio sets, photographic equipment and kayaks.

From one village to three Nordic markets.

The shift from catalogue to high street came late. The company says its first store outside Insjön opened in 1989; Swedish Wikipedia places it in central Stockholm. The first Norwegian store followed in Oslo in 1991, and the first Finnish store in Helsinki in 2002, according to Swedish and English Wikipedia. In 1999 the company was listed on the Stockholm stock exchange, and its series B shares still trade on Nasdaq Stockholm; the company says they are held by about 45,000 shareholders.

Expansion beyond the Nordic countries was tried and then reversed. The trade weekly DIY Week reported that Clas Ohlson entered the UK in 2008 with a store in Croydon, south London. English Wikipedia says that in 2014 the company formed a joint venture with Kuwait’s Al Homaizi group and opened a store at Mirdif City Centre in Dubai that May, which later closed, and that German stores opened in Hamburg in 2016. On 6 December 2018 Retail Gazette reported that the company would close all but one of its UK stores, keeping a store in Reading, along with four stores in Germany, and focus on online sales there; at that point it traded from 227 stores across Norway, Sweden and Finland, the paper said. DIY Week noted that the Croydon store had already closed that August.

Today the company describes its store sales as covering three markets, Sweden, Norway and Finland, alongside online sales. As of April 2026, when it opened stores in Värnamo and in the Lielahti district of Tampere, the company said it operated 247 stores. It says it employs more than 5,000 people, and that its Club Clas loyalty scheme has more than 6.2 million members. Through subsidiaries it also sells spare parts, batteries and technology accessories in the Nordic countries and several other European markets, and in its year-end report of June 2026 it said it had launched its Batteriexperten web shop in Finland that February.

Warehouses, web shops and store fascias.

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 founder’s name over the door.

Much of what Clas Ohlson sells carries its own labels. English Wikipedia lists house brands including Cotech and Cocraft for tools, Coline for household electrical goods and Asaklitt for luggage and travel goods, alongside the Clas Ohlson name itself, and Swedish Wikipedia adds several more. On where the products come from, Swedish Wikipedia says the company buys many of them from Asia, including China. It also records that in early 2005 the Swedish research organisation Swedwatch criticised the company for not setting strict enough ethical requirements for its suppliers, and that the company then began a process intended to improve on this.

The company still works from the village where it grew up. Its head office is in Insjön, Swedish Wikipedia says, and the company describes its range today in a handful of everyday niches, from tidying and organising to lighting, home comfort, technology and repairs. In its June 2026 year-end report it named Kristofer Tonström as president and chief executive.

The name has stayed the founder’s own throughout. The firm was called Clas Ohlson & Co at the start, according to the company, and the shortened Clas Ohlson has carried it from a mail-order catalogue posted to rural households to stores in shopping centres and retail parks across three countries.

For a design guide, Clas Ohlson shows how a founder’s name and a printed catalogue can turn into a store fascia and a web shop without changing what the business is about: practical goods for the home, explained plainly. Compare Jula, another Swedish hardware and home retailer, and Verkkokauppa.com, the Helsinki web shop that also began by selling to customers at a distance. For this guide we use ink blue, charcoal and a Falu red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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