Egersund Net Brand Guidelines: Fish-Farm Nets From Egersund, Now Part of AKVA group

Nets from a trawl maker’s town.

Egersund Net grew out of a fishing-gear business. Its former parent, Egersund Group, describes itself as a supplier to the fishing and fish-farming industries “since 1952,” and traces its roots to Egersund Trål, the trawl maker founded by Kåre Mong in Egersund, a port town in Rogaland on Norway’s south-west coast; the group marked its fiftieth year with an anniversary book, Egersund Trål 1952–2002, by Lars Martin Ramsland.

Net-making for fish farms came later. According to World Fishing, writing in July 2018, the business began net production in the early 1970s at Svanavågen in Egersund. Egersund Net’s own website, now hosted by AKVA group, gives the same start and says the net business was turned into a separate company in 1996; the Brønnøysund Register Centre lists Egersund Net AS as founded on 1 July 1996, in the municipality of Eigersund, under the trade classification for rope and net production.

Its product is the net pen, or net bag: the mesh enclosure that hangs from a floating frame at a fish farm and holds the fish. Norwegian Wikipedia describes such a bag as usually 20 to 80 metres deep, citing Egersund Net’s own product pages for the figure. The company describes itself as one of Europe’s leading suppliers of net pens and net services to fish farms, and says it develops its products together with customers and partners.

Nets, moorings and a coastal service chain.

By 2018 Egersund Net had become a sizeable business. Salmon Business, reporting in May that year, described it as a maker of nets and mooring solutions for the aquaculture industry, including top nets, tube nets and special products such as sweep nets, fish-sorting nets and nets for collecting dead fish. It had around 450 employees, its head office in Egersund, and production and service facilities in Lithuania and Turkey. The Lithuanian company UAB Egersund Net also appears in the Norwegian business register.

Service is a large part of the brand: the company says it looks after customers’ nets and equipment through the whole life of the products, from a chain of stations along the Norwegian coast. World Fishing listed them in July 2018: Egersund, Austevoll, Manger, Kristiansund, Rørvik, Brønnøysund, Vevelstad, Vesterålen and Skjervøy, in the far north. The company’s Norwegian website still speaks of nine modern service stations “from Egersund to Skjervøy,” and says its washing stations, with their own cleaning plants, are all built on the same technology.

The company also offers Net-Reg, a web-based equipment log in which fish farmers can keep the history of their nets, checklists, mooring documentation, drawings and certificates for each part of a farm. It says all its departments are certified to the Norwegian fish-farm standard NS 9415, as well as ISO 9001 and ISO 14001.

Egersund Group kept other businesses after the net company was sold. Its website today presents fishing, aquaculture and offshore divisions, including trawl gear and equipment for oil-spill response.

Design and documentation.

Aquaculture suppliers sell to fish farmers and other professional buyers, and their brands are shaped by the places their equipment works. The pictures that recur across the sector are aerial views of circular pens floating in a fjord or a sheltered bay, rows of plastic rings linked by mooring lines, and a feed barge moored beside them. Seen from above, a fish farm is a set of simple shapes on dark water, and many suppliers lean on that geometry in their photography and graphics.

Closer in, the imagery turns to working detail: net cages lifted at the edge of a pen, feed pellets and silos, hoses carrying feed out to the rings, cameras and sensors lowered into the water, and divers or remotely operated vehicles inspecting nets below the surface. Land-based farming adds a different picture, of tanks, pipes and filtration halls indoors. Service boats and workboats appear in many catalogues, because service and maintenance at sea are part of what these suppliers sell.

In many identities colour follows the setting: blues, greens and greys stand in for sea and coast, and a brighter accent, often orange or yellow, echoes the buoys, floats and safety gear that make equipment visible on the water. Type is often a plain sans, chosen for technical documents, product sheets and dashboards as much as for advertising.

Trade fairs remain an important stage for these brands. Aqua Nor in Trondheim and conferences such as AquaVision bring farmers, feed makers and equipment suppliers together, and stands there carry the same mix of pen models, barge cut-aways and screens of feeding software. The guides in this series look at how individual suppliers present themselves within that shared visual language.

A net maker inside a pen maker.

In 2018 the net company changed hands. In May, Salmon Business reported, AKVA group — the Norwegian maker of fish-farm pens, feeding systems and land-based farms — signed a letter of intent with Egersund Group to buy all the shares in Egersund Net. In July World Fishing reported that AKVA would acquire 100 per cent of the shares, with completion expected around the end of August, and that the deal would add nets and moorings to AKVA’s range. AKVA said the combination would give Egersund Net’s products access to its global distribution and would bring synergies mainly in sales, in the Nordic countries and in export markets; it also said it expected to develop technology and service for the complete life cycle of fish farming with a stronger geographical presence. AKVA group’s own history lists 2018 as the year it acquired Egersund Net.

AKVA itself is a product of mergers. Its history page dates its plastic pens to 1974, its feeding systems to 1980 and its steel pens to 1985, and records that AKVAsmart, Helgeland Plast and the Wavemaster companies of Chile and Canada combined in 2006 to form AKVA group. Egersund Net came in among a run of purchases: Sperre in 2016, and Newfoundland Aqua Service and Austevoll Rørteknikk in 2020, according to the same page.

Today the brand lives inside its new owner. AKVA group, based at Klepp stasjon in Rogaland, lists Egersund Net among its companies alongside Egersund Trading, Helgeland Plast and Sperre, and the old egersundnet.no address now forwards to a section of AKVA’s website titled “AKVA group, Egersund Net.” World Fishing described Egersund Trading in 2018 as the group’s supplier of work clothes, safety gear and mooring equipment.

For a design guide, Egersund Net shows how a place name can carry a product brand through two owners: the town stays in the name while the parent changes. Compare AKVA group, its owner since 2018, and AquaLine, another Norwegian pen-equipment brand absorbed into a larger group. For this guide we use a net green and a rope tan with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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