Essity Brand Guidelines: The 2017 SCA Spin-Off Behind TENA, Tork, Libero & Zewa

A new name on a hygiene business built inside a forest group.

Essity is a young name on an old business. The Stockholm company was split off from Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget (SCA), the Swedish forest-products group, and its shares were first traded on Nasdaq Stockholm on 15 June 2017, according to both the English and the Swedish editions of Wikipedia. The name, English Wikipedia says, is built from two English words, “essentials” and “necessity”, a choice that sets out the company’s idea of its products before any brand appears.

The hygiene business it took over had grown inside SCA for four decades. SCA was founded in 1929 as a forestry company, and it moved into hygiene products in 1975 by buying Mölnlycke, a western European maker of disposable hygiene products, Wikipedia says. Mölnlycke is still a place name in Essity’s story: Swedish Wikipedia lists a plant there, alongside the Lilla Edet paper mill and a factory at Falkenberg, with product development in Gothenburg.

From there SCA bought its way into tissue. English and Swedish Wikipedia list the European tissue business of Procter & Gamble, which brought the Tempo handkerchief brand, in 2007; a first minority stake in the Asian tissue maker Vinda the same year, which became a majority holding in 2013; and the tissue operations of Georgia-Pacific, including the Lotus brand, a purchase completed in July 2012. In August 2016 SCA said it intended to divide itself into two separately listed companies. In December that year it agreed to buy BSN medical, the company behind brands such as JOBST and Leukoplast, a deal Swedish Wikipedia says was completed in April 2017. Two months later the hygiene and health side began trading on its own as Essity, while SCA continued as the forest-products company.

Four business areas and a long list of names.

Essity organises itself into four business areas: Health & Medical, Personal Care, Consumer Tissue and Professional Hygiene. The company says it sells in about 150 countries and has about 36,000 employees. Swedish Wikipedia describes TENA and Tork as its two global lead brands, with names such as Libero, Libresse, Lotus, Zewa and Tempo working in particular regions or categories; Swedish Wikipedia also names the United States, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Mexico as its largest markets.

Each name carries a short category label on Essity’s brands page. TENA is filed under continence care, Libero under baby care, Libresse and Bodyform under feminine care, and Zewa, Lotus, Familia and Regio under toilet paper and household towels. Swedish Wikipedia adds that Zewa covers toilet paper, kitchen paper and handkerchiefs. Several of the tissue names are regional: Essity says Familia grew from a local Colombian brand in the 1960s into a brand sold across 12 Latin American markets, and that Regio is an everyday brand in Mexican homes.

Tork is the professional face of the group. Essity describes it as its global brand for hygiene in public and commercial spaces, says it has more than 50 years of experience in the field, and says that more than 30 million Tork dispensers are refilled regularly around the world. Essity describes the Tork range as tissue and dispenser systems for professional and high-traffic environments, and says innovations such as coreless systems and smart dispensers help customers work more efficiently.

The portfolio is still changing. In November 2025 Essity agreed to buy the feminine care business of Edgewell Personal Care, and on 2 February 2026 both companies announced that the sale was complete, Edgewell in a release distributed by PR Newswire and Essity in its own statement. Essity said the deal brought the Carefree, Stayfree and o.b. brands in North America, global feminine care rights to the Playtex brand, and a production facility in Dover, Delaware.

Tissue and hygiene paper makers.

Tissue and hygiene-paper makers mostly sell under names that are not their own. The corporate group is often a holding name, and shoppers meet it through a portfolio of consumer brands: Essity’s brands page lists TENA, Tork, Libero, Lotus and Zewa, each with a short category label and a link to its own website, while Sofidel puts Regina first and runs separate Regina sites for seven European countries alongside national names such as Sopalin, Le Trèfle and Hakle.

Consumer pack design follows those brand families rather than the parent. Brand names travel across toilet paper, kitchen towels and handkerchiefs, and some identify themselves by a physical detail: Sofidel says its KittenSoft tissue is recognisable by a heart-shaped embossing. Many brands came to their current owners through acquisitions, so a group’s portfolio often mixes a home-grown house brand with bought national names that keep their local identities.

The away-from-home side looks different again. Here the product is often a system for washrooms and other busy places, pairing paper with dispensers. Essity describes Tork as tissue and dispenser systems for professional and high-traffic environments and says more than 30 million Tork dispensers are refilled regularly; Sofidel lists away-from-home products as one of four business lines, next to its consumer brands, private label goods for retailers and parent reels, the large semi-finished reels sold to other converters.

The corporate websites then speak to a different audience: investors, job seekers, suppliers and journalists. Their pages typically set out the brands, the mills and the owners. Sofidel tells its story decade by decade from its first facility in 1966, and Essity explains its business areas and its 2017 origin as a spin-off from SCA. Sustainability sections on forests, water and plastics sit alongside those histories, written in each company’s own words.

A group name above a family of brands.

Essity is set up as a house of brands. On its own website the group name sits above a grid of brand cards, each with a one-line category label and a link out to the brand’s own site, such as torkglobal.com, tena.com or libero.com. The corporate site itself carries sections for investors, careers and suppliers, and a global newsroom with local pages for markets including France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Sweden and the United States. The company’s legal name, shown on the site, is Essity Aktiebolag, based in Stockholm.

The group has had two chief executives since it was listed. Swedish Wikipedia names Magnus Groth, who held the post from 2015 to 2025, and Ulrika Kolsrud, appointed president and chief executive by the board in May 2025, according to English Wikipedia. It was Kolsrud who commented for Essity when the Edgewell purchase closed in 2026.

Its sustainability language is also part of how it presents itself. Swedish Wikipedia says Essity’s emissions targets were approved by the Science Based Targets initiative in December 2018, and English Wikipedia notes that the company has been included in the Dow Jones Sustainability World and Europe indices. Essity’s own pages group these themes under headings for forest and fibre, plastics, water and waste.

For a design guide, Essity shows how a corporate name created in 2017 can sit quietly above older, better-travelled brands, leaving TENA, Tork and the tissue names to carry the visual weight. Compare Sofidel, the Italian family-owned tissue group, and Georgia-Pacific, whose tissue operations, including Lotus, passed to SCA in 2012. For this guide we use a night indigo, a soft lilac and a fjord teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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