Thirteen Swedish printers become one group.

Esselte began as a printing business, not an office-supplies maker. Swedish Wikipedia, citing the Nationalencyklopedin, says AB Sveriges Litografiska Tryckerier — SLT — was formed in 1913 by the merger of a group of printing companies, with the aim of curbing the competition and price pressure that had troubled Swedish printers since the late nineteenth century. One of the driving figures was the engineer Carl Ramström, head of the Norstedts printing works, who became managing director of SLT; according to the same article he held the post formally until 1933, though in practice only until 1922.

The name came later. English Wikipedia explains that “Esselte” reflects the Swedish pronunciation of the letters S-L-T. Swedish Wikipedia adds that the name had been used from 1933 by a subsidiary that grouped the company’s printing works, and that the whole group took it in 1970.

For much of the twentieth century the group was a printer and publisher. Swedish Wikipedia records paper-making at the Örebro paper mill from 1944 to 1974, packaging units — Esselte Pac, sold in 1984, and the corrugated-board maker Esselte Well, sold in 1988 — and printing within subsidiaries including Norstedt & Söner, Almqvist & Wiksell and the Focus encyclopaedia, plus map publishing through Esselte Map Service. That printing was wound down by 1990, and manufacturing turned to office materials. A schoolbook and dictionary publisher, Esselte Studium, grew out of the older Skrivrit company, took the Esselte name in 1973 and closed in the mid-1980s; in the 1980s it worked with Telenova on the Compis school computer.

There were stranger detours too. In the 1980s Esselte made the Moviebox, a VHS player that video shops could rent out with a film, and in 1986 it built the Filmstaden Downtown cinema in Gothenburg and a cinema complex in Malmö. Two years later it formed a joint cinema company with Svensk Filmindustri, which became the main owner in 1992, Swedish Wikipedia says, citing Göran Bjelkendal’s history of Gothenburg’s cinemas.

Binders, files and a 21–70–21 standard.

In Sweden, the Esselte product people know is the binder. Swedish Wikipedia credits Andreas Tengvall with a forerunner of the lever-arch binder in 1889 and a patent in 1890 on the Trio binder, the ancestor of the Jopa binder. Esselte bought Tengvall’s company in 1926 and began making the Jopa. The same article describes a construction that has not changed: a divisible spine of ash wood covered in cloth, and a three-hole system whose spacing — 21, 70 and 21 millimetres between hole centres — became the Swedish binder standard.

A second Swedish binder joined in 1983, when Esselte took over Galco-Dux and its Agrippa binder, Swedish Wikipedia says.

The group also grew abroad by acquisition. According to Swedish Wikipedia, citing the Nationalencyklopedin, it bought the British storage-products maker Bensons in 1975, the hanging-file maker Oxford Pendaflex in 1977 and the American labelling company Dymo in 1978. Sources differ on the date it bought the German office-products maker Leitz, founded by Louis Leitz in Stuttgart: Swedish Wikipedia gives 1992, while English Wikipedia, citing the International Directory of Company Histories, gives 1998.

English Wikipedia lists the brands Esselte has sold files, binders, folders, covers, staplers, letter trays and computer accessories under as Esselte, Leitz, Oxford, Pendaflex, Rapid and Xyron. Swedish Wikipedia dates the purchase of the American company Xyron to 2003, and says that in spring 2010 Esselte bought the Swedish stapler maker Isaberg Rapid and in June 2010 the American paper-products company Ampad. Dymo went the other way: Esselte sold it to Newell Rubbermaid in 2005, a sale reported by Cabling Installation & Maintenance in October 2005.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all office-supply names: Leitz, Rexel, Fellowes, Swingline, Esselte, Bostitch and ACCO. Office-supply brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a stationery shop to an office-furniture catalogue.

An office-supply brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single stapler or file than by a name, a colour and the products people recognise on a desk, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factories or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its identity has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From the Stockholm exchange to ACCO Brands.

Esselte was a listed company until 2002. Swedish Wikipedia, citing an Esselte press release on Cision, says that in July 2002 it was bought out from the Stockholm stock exchange by J.W. Childs; English Wikipedia, citing Esselte’s own corporate history, describes J.W. Childs Associates as a Boston, Massachusetts, private-equity firm and says Esselte was then listed in both Stockholm and London.

The next change of hands was to a direct competitor. On 1 February 2017, ACCO Brands of Lake Zurich, Illinois, announced that it had completed the acquisition of Esselte Group Holdings AB. The press release said the combined European business would be run by Cezary Monko, formerly president and chief executive of Esselte, and listed Esselte among ACCO Brands’ trademarks. ACCO Brands has owned Esselte since 2017; Swedish Wikipedia describes Esselte today as an office-products group whose parent company is based in Luxembourg and which is part of ACCO Brands.

The Esselte name is also attached to buildings. According to Swedish Wikipedia, the Esselte building (Esselte-huset) stands on Vasagatan in central Stockholm, the group’s former office and warehouse building is on Herkulesgatan, and Esselte later had a building at Solna, north of the city.

For a design guide, Esselte shows how a printing group’s initials can become a brand once the printing is gone. Compare Leitz, the Stuttgart binder maker Esselte bought, and Rexel, the British office-products name. For this guide we use a binder blue, an ash-wood tone and a paper white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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