Eton Brand Guidelines: The Gånghester Shirtmaker That Began With Dresses in 1928

A dress workshop outside Borås.

Eton here means the Swedish shirtmaker, not the English school. It began in 1928 in Gånghester, a village just outside Borås in Sweden’s textile region. The company, the investors Litorina and EQT and the law firm Vinge all give that date and place. Accounts of the founders differ.

The company’s own history says cousins Annie Pettersson and Febe Lidar started sewing dresses in a small workshop, trading as Lidar & Pettersson. In 1931, it says, Annie and her husband David Pettersson took over management and renamed the business Syfabriken Special, the Special Sewing Factory. English Wikipedia gives a family story instead: Annie sewing dresses in the family kitchen, and David joining her after the Depression forced him to close his sawmill. It names the two of them as founders. Litorina and Vinge, in their deal statements, say the Davidson family founded the firm; the Davidsons are the couple’s descendants, and the company names three sons, Rune, Arne and Inge Davidson.

From dresses the business moved to shirts. The company says it bought the Gånghester property in 1933, the site of its headquarters today, that it was specialising increasingly in men’s shirts by 1937, and that it decided in 1946 to focus solely on shirts, chiefly in poplin. Wikipedia records an intermediate name, Skjortfabriken Special, the Special Shirt Factory. The company’s 1945 entry gives the sentence it still treats as its philosophy, attributed to Annie: “Never hand over a shirt until you are completely satisfied with it.”

The name came next, and the two accounts differ on where it came from. The company says that in 1948 Rune and Arne Davidson travelled to England, reached the town of Eton, and came home with a name for a new product, “The Eton Shirt,” and that in 1950 the firm adopted Eton as its company name. Wikipedia says the shirt was inspired by Eton College, dates the shirt to the early 1950s, and says the company took the name around the mid-1950s, when exports to Britain began, because Skjortfabriken Special was hard for non-Swedes to say.

The company dates its first foreign move to 1955, with exclusive stores in London followed by Scandinavia, Germany and France. It says a new factory went up at the Gånghester headquarters in 1954.

A conveyor, a twill and a wrinkle-resistant shirt.

Eton’s name also survives on a factory system. The company says that in 1963 poor fabric handling led Inge Davidson to create an automated assembly line. In a 2024 profile, Business Focus reported that the conveyor business was divested from Eton Fashion to form Eton Systems in 1967, and that Davidson designed a hanging conveyor that moved all the material for one garment as a unit between workstations. The chief executive of Eton Systems called it the world’s first Unit Production System. Based in Borås, Eton Systems went through a management buyout in 2022, the same profile says.

The shirt itself was repositioned in the 1980s. Eton says it launched a plan in 1984 to become the leading Swedish shirt brand, with a slogan, “No other shirt is sewn with greater care.” Hans Davidson, a grandson of the founders according to Wikipedia, was chief executive from 1989, MR Magazine reported, until 2019.

The shirts Eton now promotes most heavily date from the early 1990s. The company describes its “most iconic shirt” as a sharp, wrinkle-resistant dress shirt in Signature Twill, introduced in 1990. In 1992, it says, it introduced the Eton Etastar, which it calls the first-ever wrinkle-resistant cotton shirt, and Harrods launched it first. English Wikipedia also says the shirt, developed with Swiss experts, was the first non-iron shirt in 100% cotton, citing a 2018 magazine feature, and that Harrods sold more than 600 in its first week. Eton dates its collar for dress shirts to 1991, describing a seven-part construction.

The range has widened since. Eton made a women’s line for a decade from 1979, it says, and its website now lists polo shirts, knitwear and jackets beside shirts, ties and cufflinks. In 2018 it introduced what it calls the world’s first crease-resistant flannel, along with wrinkle-resistant linen. In 2013 Realtid reported a more limited project at home: eight experienced seamstresses hired to sew the first 3,000 shirts of a collection called DnA by Eton at Gånghester, sold through retailers including Harrods and Saks Fifth Avenue.

Own retail came later. The company dates its first flagship store to 2010, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, with Stockholm and London following, and its own online store to 2013. Litorina said in December 2015 that Eton was delivering a million shirts that year to customers across 43 countries, with the United States its largest market. The 2025 EQT statement gave more than 50 countries.

Cloth and the counter.

Shirtmakers show their work through cloth. A bolt of poplin, a stack of stripes or a swatch book does what a logo does elsewhere: it tells a customer what kind of house this is. Charvet presents its shirtings in full bolts rather than on swatch cards, according to English Wikipedia, which describes a wall of four hundred white fabrics on its bespoke floor. Turnbull & Asser says its pattern books from the 1920s and 1930s survive, and it sells bespoke and made-to-measure shirts from its London shops.

Collars are the category’s other recurring image. They are small, repeatable shapes, easy to set out in rows and easy to tell apart. A Highsnobiety visit to Charvet found collar samples pinned to velvet and framed on the wall, and Turnbull & Asser names a collar of its own, the Classic T&A, as its signature style, English Wikipedia says. Paper patterns and fitting shirts belong to the same picture of a trade built on measurement.

Place matters as much as product. London’s Jermyn Street, in St James’s, is home to shirtmakers whose shop fronts appear in their own storytelling, and Turnbull & Asser dates its address there to 1903. In Paris, Charvet’s full name includes Place Vendôme.

Neckwear shares the same visual stock: silk ties folded and laid out by colour, and woven or printed patterns shown in ranges rather than one at a time. This guide sets out what can be checked about each house, including who founded it, who owns it now and where it says its products are made. Where a story rests on a company’s own account, the text says so. The tones and typefaces shown are our own interpretation.

From family firm to private investors.

The family sold in 2012. Litorina, the Swedish investor, became majority shareholder when, it says, the founding family looked for a partner for expansion; the law firm Vinge recorded that the Davidsons kept a 35% stake. Litorina says staff grew by 90% and Eton launched its own online store under its ownership. In December 2015 EQT VII agreed to buy Eton from Litorina IV and minority shareholders, with completion expected in early 2016. EQT counted about 155 employees worldwide at that point.

Leadership changed in 2019, when David Thörewik, previously managing director of H&M’s Weekday brand, succeeded Hans Davidson, MR Magazine reported. Davidson stayed on as a senior adviser.

A further change followed. On 27 June 2025 EQT announced that Eton had moved from EQT VII to a consortium of private long-term investors, including Mikael Schiller, Caspar Callerström and Thomas von Koch. EQT’s statement said the consortium was selected by Eton’s existing lenders through a competitive process supported by EQT, and quoted its chief executive on a balance sheet allowing investment in growth. Eton’s 2025 sustainability report calls that year demanding, and says the new ownership provided stability. Eton remains headquartered in Gånghester.

Eton describes a supply chain spread across Europe. It says the vast majority of its textile suppliers are in Italy. It lists sewing factories in Romania and Lithuania, supported by garment factories in Bulgaria, Portugal and Turkey. Gånghester, it says, keeps a small production unit for product development, technique and innovation testing, and its quality team specifies assembly to a third of a millimetre. Its targets, as stated in 2020 and on its site, include organic or recycled cotton by 2025 and climate neutrality by 2035, and it has published sustainability reports since 2018.

For a design guide, Eton shows how a company can narrow itself to one object, then carry that focus through changes of owner. Its product language is technical: twill, collar construction, wrinkle resistance. Compare Harrods, the store that launched its Etastar shirt, and Thomas Pink, another shirt brand. For this guide we use a slate, a spruce and a cool grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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