Evolis Brand Guidelines: The Angers Card-Printer Maker Now Part of HID Global

Five founders on the edge of Angers.

Evolis makes machines that print and encode plastic cards: staff badges, student and membership cards, driver’s licences, transit passes and bank cards, according to the markets listed on its website. French Wikipedia says the company was created in December 1999 by Emmanuel Picot, its chief executive, Cécile Belanger, its vice-president, and Didier Godard, Yves Liatard and Serge Olivier. ASSA ABLOY’s announcement of July 2023 also says Evolis was established in 1999, while the company’s own website says the Evolis Group was founded in 2000.

It is an Anjou business. Evolis says its headquarters are in Beaucouzé, on the edge of Angers in western France, and that its only production centre is on the same site, close to its design office. French Wikipedia likewise places the head office and the factory near Angers.

Growth came through a stock-market listing and a string of offices abroad. French Wikipedia says Evolis floated on the Alternext market of Euronext Paris in 2006, and used the money to open a branch in Singapore. The company dates its first subsidiary, in Miami, to 2005 and the Singapore office to 2006. French Wikipedia records a sales office in Shanghai in 2009, which Evolis lists as a subsidiary from 2014, and the purchase in 2013 of 70 per cent of the Indian company Rajpurohit Cardtec, which became Evolis India, based in Mumbai. Evolis adds a sales office in Boston in 2017.

Printers, ribbons, software and badges.

The printers come in named families. The company’s current range includes the Primacy 2 and Zenius 2 printers, the Avansia printer and the Agilia, alongside lamination modules and models designed for particular projects, including print modules for self-service kiosks. Evolis says its range runs from simple printing in small batches to the full personalisation of chip cards in large volumes, and it describes its expertise as the instant, decentralised issuing of cards and badges.

Around the printers it built a wider kit, partly by buying other firms. Its consumables, including ribbons and cleaning kits, are sold under the Evolis High Trust name, the company says, and it also sells blank cards, signature pads and badge accessories such as holders, clips and lanyards; it dates its purchase of Sogedex Accessories, a Paris distributor of identification accessories, to 2012. French Wikipedia records that in 2014 Evolis took a majority stake in CardPresso, a Portuguese maker of card-design software, and completed the purchase of Detraplast, bringing its plastics staff and equipment into the Beaucouzé plant.

The group trades under more than one name. Its website says Evolis, Badgy and Edikio are all brands of the Evolis Group: its range includes the Badgy200 printer, and its Edikio software is named for price tags and guest labels. The company says it is certified to ISO 9001 and ISO 14001.

Evolis sells mostly through others. ASSA ABLOY described it in 2023 as a company that develops, manufactures and sells printers and software for personalising physical credentials, such as identity cards, access badges and payment cards, through a well-established channel network, and put its staff at some 380. The company says it works with about 3,000 partners in 140 countries and runs partner programmes under the Evolis Red and Evolis Engage names. Its software line includes cardPresso, Evolis Badge Studio and the Evolis Print Service App, and its signature pads are sold under the SIG name, with the SIG100 and SIG200 among them; the company says a pad used with one of its printers lets a signature be placed directly in the card design.

Design and documentation.

Security screening and identity hardware is mostly seen in passing: the X-ray tunnel at an airport checkpoint, the arch a traveller walks through, the grey trays that slide back along a roller track. The companies that make this equipment sell to airports, customs services, border agencies, banks and governments rather than to the public, and their brands are built for procurement teams, regulators and trade-fair visitors.

Their imagery follows the equipment. Websites and brochures show security lanes with scanner tunnels and conveyor belts, walk-through metal detectors, cargo portals and gantries that a lorry drives through, and the operator screens on which bags appear as layered X-ray images. Identity makers work at a different scale: card printers small enough for an office desk, and the production lines on which passports, bank cards and ID cards are made and personalised.

Much of the business is about approvals and contracts. Makers name the regulators whose lists or standards their machines appear on, such as the US Transportation Security Administration or the European Civil Aviation Conference, and announce orders airport by airport and agency by agency. New products are shown at trade fairs such as Passenger Terminal Expo for airport equipment and Security Essen in Germany, where screening, access-control and identity companies exhibit side by side.

Ownership in this field changes often. Some of the makers in this guide were built from acquisitions or sit inside larger listed groups, and some have changed hands recently: Smiths Detection passed from Smiths Group to CVC Capital Partners in June 2026. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a Paris listing to HID Global.

Evolis did not stay independent. By July 2023 its shares were listed on Euronext Growth in Paris, and most of them were held by a holding company, Cedys & Co, with about 84 per cent, and by two Crédit Mutuel investment funds with 14 per cent, according to ASSA ABLOY. On 19 July 2023 ASSA ABLOY announced that its subsidiary HID Global intended to buy about 98.5 per cent of Evolis, followed by a public tender offer for the remaining shares. Evolis says the acquisition took place in September 2023.

Inside HID the name has been kept. The company’s website describes Evolis as “part of HID Global, an Assa Abloy Company,” and says the move was meant to ensure that Evolis remains a trusted brand for its customers; the site names Christophe Peraudeau as vice-president and head of Evolis. ASSA ABLOY’s 2023 announcement described Evolis as a technological addition to its secure-issuance business.

The brand rests on one short company name and on printer names that read as a family: Primacy, Zenius, Avansia, Agilia. Consumables, software and accessories sit under the same name, while Badgy and Edikio carry their own.

For a design guide, Evolis shows how a maker of small office machines can build a family of product names around one short company name. Compare Zebra, the American printer maker, and Entrust, another maker of card-issuing systems. For this guide we use a graphite, a crimson and a pearl with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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