Eco Log Brand Guidelines: Söderhamn Harvesters From Skogsjan to Lazarus

A machine works older than its name.

Eco Log is a Swedish maker of forestry machines based in Söderhamn, on Sweden’s east coast. The company is open about the fact that its name is younger than its factory. Its own history page says the Eco Log name has existed since 2004, but that Söderhamn has been a place where forestry machines are built since 1965, when Kockums began production in the premises.

The line that leads to today’s machines runs through a local firm called Skogsjan. Swedish Wikipedia describes Skogsjan AB as a Söderhamn forestry-machine company active from the late 1970s until 1997, founded and led by the engineer Jan Eriksson, whose nickname came from the company. One of its machines was a harvester commonly called “the spider,” whose four drive wheels sat on individually controlled pendulum arms so that the machine could keep its footing in difficult terrain. Eco Log’s own history puts the launch of this “Spindelmaskinen” in 1986 and describes its hydraulic wheel motors mounted on pendulum arms as the origin of today’s products.

Skogsjan did not last as an independent firm. Swedish Wikipedia, citing the trade papers Skogsaktuellt and Jordbruksaktuellt, says the company ran up large debts in the late 1990s and went bankrupt, and that in March 1997 the American group Caterpillar became the main owner, placing the business in its Caterpillar Forestry division. The same article says Caterpillar wanted to learn the cut-to-length method and win market share in Scandinavia and Europe, and also to develop the method in the United States and Canada.

The Caterpillar period ended in 2004. Realtid, the Swedish business paper, reported in January 2017 that the business had been run by Stig Linderholm since 2004, after he acquired Caterpillar’s production line for forestry machines. That is the year the Eco Log name begins, according to the company.

Harvesters, forwarders and heads.

Eco Log makes machines for the cut-to-length method, in which trees are felled, delimbed and cut into logs at the stump by a harvester and carried out of the forest by a forwarder. Realtid described the company in 2017 as developing, making and selling forestry machines for this method, with its seat in Söderhamn, about 60 per cent of sales going abroad, and a range of nine types of harvesters and forwarders.

The range today is set out on the company’s website. It lists seven harvester models, among them the 550G T-PRO, which it calls a thinning specialist, the larger 590G and the eight-wheeled 688G; three forwarders, the 574F, 584F and 594F, rated by the company for loads of up to 14, 16 and 20 tonnes; and a series of five harvester heads named EC 461 LF to EC 761 LF. Eco Log says its forwarders use Volvo Penta engines and its harvesters Volvo Penta D8 engines.

The pendulum arm is still the idea the company leads with. Its Swedish “About” page says its machines adapt to the ground with the help of their pendulum arms, giving the operator control of the work whatever the terrain, and the company describes the 688G as built for steep terrain and soft ground. Those are the company’s own descriptions of its designs.

Beyond the machines, the website lists service and spare-parts agreements, used machines and an operator simulator called Eco Log Sim. It also publishes a sustainability report and runs used-machine days at Söderhamn. The company uses the tagline “Forestry of Tomorrow” and says its staff work across production, development, design, sales, purchasing and technical support at the Söderhamn site, which is also its postal address as Eco Log Sweden AB.

How forestry machine makers present themselves.

Forestry machine makers sell to a small, expert audience: logging contractors, forest companies and the operators who spend long shifts in the cab. Their imagery follows the work. Harvesters and forwarders are photographed in snow, in dense spruce stands and on soft ground, often from low angles that show the crane, the wheels and the load together, and many makers give equal space to the view from the operator’s seat: the cab interior, the controls and the screens of the measuring and control systems.

Paint does much of the branding. Machines are usually finished in a single strong colour, whether yellow, green or red, and makers tend to keep it through mergers and new names. When Komatsu Forest’s machines dropped the Valmet name in 2011, the company said their red would stay, the timber-trade news service Lesprom reported.

Many of these brands are tied to particular towns. In Finland and Sweden the factory and the head office often sit in the same place, sometimes in the community where the business began: Ponsse still builds every machine in Vieremä, in Northern Savonia, and Komatsu Forest has both its headquarters and its manufacturing in Umeå, in northern Sweden, according to the companies. Founding stories, early machines and local workshops feature prominently in their own histories.

The trade meets at working demonstrations rather than in showrooms. Fairs such as FinnMetko in Finland and Elmia Wood in Sweden bring makers, contractors and machines together, and makers time launches and road shows around them: Ponsse says almost 30,000 visitors came to Metko in 2008, and that an international tour in 2007 ended at the Elmia fair in Jönköping. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it and where its machines are made.

From a founder’s firm to an industrial group.

The ownership of Eco Log changed twice in the decade after 2012. In January 2017 Realtid reported that Stig Linderholm, whom the paper called the founder and owner of Eco Log, had invited the investment fund Accent Equity 2012 to become a co-owner. The paper quoted the company’s press release as saying that Accent would help Eco Log continue to expand in Sweden and abroad. Eco Log’s own history also mentions a period with Log Max among its owners.

The next change came at the end of 2022. Eco Log’s website says that Eco Log Group has been owned by the Stockholm investment company Lazarus Industriförvaltning since December 2022, and links to the owner’s website.

Taken together, the sources give Eco Log a long chain of owners: a factory opened by Kockums in 1965, a design from a local founder’s firm in the 1980s, seven years under Caterpillar from 1997, and then Swedish private and industrial owners from 2004. The company still presents Söderhamn as its manufacturing site, and the pendulum arm first shown on the Skogsjan “spider” remains the feature its own pages lead with.

The product line-up is named with numbers and letters rather than words, so that a harvester or forwarder is identified by a code such as 580G or 594F. Its pages are published in Swedish, English and Finnish.

For a design guide, Eco Log shows how one engineering idea can carry a brand through several owners. Compare Caterpillar, which owned the Söderhamn business from 1997 to 2004, and Rottne, another Swedish forestry machine maker. For this guide we use spruce green, bark and birch white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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