Electrolux Professional Brand Guidelines: A 2020 Spin-Off With Laundry Roots in Ljungby

A professional arm with laundry roots in Småland.

Electrolux Professional is the Stockholm company that makes equipment for professional kitchens, beverage service and laundries, for customers such as hotels, restaurants, hospitals and schools, as Swedish Wikipedia puts it. It is the former professional arm of AB Electrolux, the household-appliance group, and has been a separate company listed on Nasdaq Stockholm since 23 March 2020.

Its history inside Electrolux is long. The company says the professional business dates back to 1962, when Electrolux bought Elektro Helios, a firm that was also active in professional food service, and that it moved into professional laundry in the early 1970s. Swedish Wikipedia, citing two company histories by Ulla Rosén and a 2013 history of industry in Ljungby, fills in the laundry side. Its roots run to Calor, a heating firm founded in Stockholm in 1902 that also installed large belt-driven washing machines for industry, and to a front-loading washer designed in Gothenburg during the Second World War by a small firm later renamed Domus. The name Wascator, a blend of “washing” and “lavatory,” was coined in 1947 and soon covered the whole company.

Production moved step by step from 1959 to Ljungby, in Småland, under the Gothenburg heating group CTC. In the 1960s Wascator exported machines to laundromats in the United States, and later to England, Australia and Denmark as the idea spread. It became a separate company in 1972, and in 1973 it was sold to Electrolux, which until then had never managed to establish itself in washing machines, Swedish Wikipedia says. From 1978 Wascator concentrated on machines of 7 kg and up. In 1997 the name Electrolux Laundry Systems was introduced, and in September 2004 the Electrolux-Wascator brand was dropped in favour of a single global Electrolux brand.

A business area becomes a listed company.

According to the company’s own timeline, Electrolux brought all of its professional operations together as one business area for the first time in 1989. Between 1996 and 2002 around 20 smaller plants were closed, and in 1999 an operational headquarters was set up in Pordenone, in north-east Italy, with the main food-service product line run from there and the main laundry line from Ljungby. Expansion in North America followed from 2004, and a plant in Thailand was added in 2005.

The separation was planned in public. Electrolux announced in January 2019 that it was preparing to separate and list its Professional Products business area. On 21 February 2020 an extraordinary general meeting of AB Electrolux decided to distribute all the shares in Electrolux Professional to its own shareholders, the company’s listing page says. Trading began on 23 March 2020 under the short names EPRO A and EPRO B. Nasdaq’s announcement that day called the company a spin-off from AB Electrolux and said its products were made in 12 plants in seven countries and sold in more than 110. The company now describes itself as fully independent, with no ties to Electrolux.

Acquisitions have widened the group before and since. English Wikipedia and the company list SPM, an Italian maker of frozen-beverage machines, in 2018; Unic, a French espresso-machine maker, in 2019; and Unified Brands, bought from Dover Corporation and closed in December 2021. On the laundry side, the company bought Schneidereit, a supplier of laundry rental solutions in Germany and Austria, in 2018, and in 2024 completed the purchase of TOSEI Corporation, a Japanese maker of laundry and vacuum-packing machines founded in 1950. In 2022 it introduced Electrolux Professional Group as a corporate brand, to make clear the difference between the company and its main product brand.

Design and documentation.

Commercial laundry equipment is sold to two quite different worlds. At one end are laundromats, hotels and restaurants, where a row of stainless-steel washer-extractors and tumble dryers sits in plain view of customers and staff; at the other are industrial laundries, closed factories that wash for hospitals, hotels, airlines, cruise ships and workwear services. Girbau, for example, divides its business into commercial, self-service and industrial laundries, while Kannegiesser lists healthcare, hospitality and workwear among the uses for its machines.

In the industrial plants the machines become a production line. Soiled linen is sorted, carried on overhead monorails, washed in tunnel washers that move batches from chamber to chamber, then fed into flatwork ironers and folders or, for garments, steamed in tunnel finishers. Kannegiesser presents its range in exactly these terms, as one system from sorting to stacking, and in 2022 added a camera-guided robot that feeds towels into a folding machine.

For smaller customers the brand lives on the machine itself: the stainless front, the porthole door and the control panel. Girbau, for one, also sells a remote monitoring system called Sapphire. Makers speak a shared language of capacity and of water, energy and chemical use, and name their certifications and sustainability programmes prominently; the claims behind them are the makers’ own.

Many of these names remain family firms rooted in particular towns. Girbau grew from a workshop in Vic, in Catalonia, and Kannegiesser from a shed near Vlotho, in East Westphalia; Kannegiesser’s partner Montanari is a family business in Modena, in northern Italy. Several now build close to their customers abroad, as Girbau did when it opened a plant in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 2025. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — founding, ownership and where it builds — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

A master brand among several.

Today the group, headquartered in Stockholm, reports in two segments, Food & Beverage and Laundry, and says it has about 4,300 employees and 14 manufacturing sites. Electrolux Professional is its master brand. In laundry it also sells under TOSEI, Schneidereit Professional and Wascomat, a name it presents as “built to last since 1955.”

The company’s supply-chain page names its three largest factories as Vallenoncello in Italy, Ljungby in Sweden and Rayong in Thailand, which produce for global markets. Laundry machines are made at Ljungby, which builds washers and dryers; at Troyes in France, which makes washers and ironers; at Rayong, which makes washers and dryers; and at Izunokuni in Shizuoka, Japan, where the washers and dryers are mainly for laundromats, according to the company.

Its newest laundry work was shown in Milan. In October 2026 the company said it would present Generation 7000, a new laundry platform, at the EXPODETERGO International fair, with a first model called Compact Power in washer and dryer versions, alongside the European introduction of a refreshed Wascomat brand identity, a name the company says is well known in North America.

For a design guide, Electrolux Professional shows how a business unit becomes a listed company with its own corporate name while keeping a famous product brand, and how a Swedish laundry maker’s story carries on inside it. Compare Electrolux, the household-appliance group it left in 2020, and IMESA, a family-owned Italian maker of laundry equipment. For this guide we use a deep navy and a cool steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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