Elverys Brand Guidelines: The Elephant House, Sackville Street and a Mayo Owner

A waterproofing shop on Sackville Street.

Elverys dates itself to 1847, the founding year given by the company and by English Wikipedia. Its documented shop history begins a little later. An essay published by RTÉ Brainstorm in July 2025 says that J. W. Elvery opened J. W. Elvery & Co, manufacturers of waterproof fabrics and garments, at No. 46 Lower Sackville Street, the street now called O’Connell Street, on 11 November 1850. The extended Elvery family, the essay says, was involved in the India-rubber business.

The building already had a name. The RTÉ essay traces Elephant House to a handbill of 1808 advertising a small animal with an elephant-like trunk, a tapir, on show at No. 46. A grocer that moved into the building in 1817 used an elephant in its adverts, and later occupants kept the name through the 1830s and 1840s. The elephant became the company’s symbol, English Wikipedia says, and its later shops in Abbey Street in Dublin, in Cork and in London were each sited in an Elephant House too, according to RTÉ.

The early stock was practical. On opening, the essay says, the shop advertised waterproof coats, capes, caps, trousers and leggings for travelling, riding, walking, driving and fishing, with riding and walking petticoats made to measure for women. Later in the century it courted anglers travelling through Dublin to Killarney and elsewhere, then, from the 1880s, the new team sports: rugby, football, cricket, hockey and croquet, as well as golf, gymnastics and athletics. The essay notes that it supplied Gaelic games too, and calls Elverys “one of the oldest surviving retail establishments in Dublin.”

An elephant over the door.

The elephant is the nearest thing Elverys has to a documented brand mark, and its story is a small piece of Dublin shop-front history. In the mid-1890s the company took over the building next door, giving it the address 46–47 Lower Sackville Street, in works overseen by the architect George Palmer Beater in 1894. The golden elephant that had stood over the doorway of No. 46 for almost fifty years was lost during the rebuilding, according to RTÉ, and English Wikipedia says a new statue was commissioned.

Its return was staged as a small campaign. In the weeks before the replacement went up, the RTÉ essay says, Elverys placed anonymous newspaper adverts asking readers to “Look out for the Elephant” and “Where is the Elephant?” The new elephant arrived by cart in February 1895 and was installed above the entrance.

The Sackville Street era ended in the 1950s. The company held a centenary dinner in 1950, and in 1954 it was reorganised and the building sold, RTÉ reports. The statue was removed, but the plinth on which it stood is still visible over the door of the Supermac’s restaurant that now occupies the building, according to both English Wikipedia and RTÉ.

The animal itself did not leave the brand. The essay notes that Elverys now trades from Suffolk Street in Dublin, with an elephant above the door.

Design and documentation.

European sporting-goods chains present themselves most visibly through the shop sign. A name, a logo and a set of colours have to work on a high-street fascia, a shopping-centre unit, a large out-of-town store and a website at once, and the companies show these marks on their own sites and in their store photographs. The colours and type in this guide are our own interpretation, not official specifications.

Store formats vary widely. SportScheck, the Munich chain, runs city-centre stores and an online shop, and in 2024 it opened a 2,000-square-metre Berlin store under a concept it calls “Future Retail,” FashionUnited reported. Sport 2000 separates a general multi-category shop from specialist running and team-sport formats that carry names of their own.

Ownership takes several forms, and it is worth stating plainly. Buying groups such as Sport 2000 and Intersport link independent shops that keep their own owners while sharing a name, buying terms and marketing; Germany’s competition authority named both groups as competitors when it reviewed SportScheck’s sale in 2020. Other chains belong to larger retail groups: SportScheck was owned by the Otto Group from 1991 and by Signa Retail from 2020, and since 2024 it has been part of Italy’s Cisalfa Sport. Own ranges sit beside outside brands, as with Witeblaze, the label Sport 2000 launched in 2023.

Corporate pages tell the founding story in each company’s own words, from Otto Scheck’s Munich clothing business of 1946 to the 36 French retailers who formed Sport 2000 in 1966. This guide sets out what can be checked about each chain — founders, owners, insolvencies and sales, with dates — and marks what rests only on the company’s own account.

From Castlebar to the High Court and back.

The modern business is run from the west of Ireland. Staunton Sports, a County Mayo company, took over Elverys in 1998, according to the company and to English Wikipedia. The legal entity today is Staunton Sports Ltd, trading as Intersport Elverys, with its registered address at Castlebar, County Mayo, the company says. Its shops carry the name Intersport Elverys, pairing the Elverys name with that of Intersport, the international sports-retail group.

The chain went through a court-supervised restructuring in 2014. In February that year the Mayo-headquartered company was placed into examinership, the Irish court-protection process for companies in difficulty, after being granted High Court protection from creditors including Nama, the state asset agency, The Irish Times reported. On 31 March 2014 the paper reported that the examiner had approved a bid from the chain’s management team as preferred investor, ahead of rival offers that included one from Sports Direct; the business then had more than 700 staff. On 21 May 2014 the Irish Examiner reported that the High Court had approved a survival scheme for Staunton Sports, then employing 700 people full and part-time in 52 stores, allowing it to leave examinership.

The family later returned. The Currency reported in October 2022 that the Staunton family lost control of the business in 2014 through the examinership and came back five years later, buying back equity after a shareholder restructuring.

Store counts are given here only with their dates. Accounts for 2024 showed the company operating 44 stores across the country alongside the elverys.ie website, with 586 staff, the Irish Examiner reported in February 2026; the company’s corporate page gives 46 stores. A connected company bought the former Debenhams store, earlier Roches Stores, on St Patrick’s Street in Cork in May 2023, and on 28 January 2026 Cork City Council issued a final grant of permission to divide it into four separate units, the same report said. On its corporate page the company describes itself as wholly Irish-owned, says it sells own-brand clothing, accessories and equipment as well as other brands, and names its sponsorship of the Mayo men’s senior GAA team.

For a design guide, Elverys shows how a shop sign can outlast the shop: an elephant first linked to a Dublin building in the early 1800s still appears above the door of its Suffolk Street store. Compare Intersport, the group whose name now sits beside Elverys on its shops, and Sports Direct, one of the rival bidders in 2014. For this guide we use a deep green and an elephant gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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