Flyeralarm Brand Guidelines: Thorsten Fischer’s 2002 Würzburg Online Printer & a League Logo

An online order desk that bought its own presses.

Flyeralarm was founded in 2002 by Thorsten Fischer, German Wikipedia says. At first the business took print orders online and passed the printing itself to other printers; it started with three employees. In 2006 Fischer began buying the company’s own printing presses, and in the same year Flyeralarm merged with Towergroup Besitz GmbH of Greußenheim, a village west of Würzburg, which from then on traded under the Flyeralarm name. Also in 2006, Fischer and the managing director of Schleunungdruck in Marktheidenfeld set up Druckhaus Mainfranken, a printing house in which Flyeralarm holds a stake.

The head office moved from Greußenheim to Würzburg in 2009, and in 2010 the company began to offer printing on climate-neutral paper as a paid option, according to German Wikipedia. The company’s own website describes the method behind its business plainly: since 2002, it says, it has worked in a “paper-optimised” gang-run process, the Sammeldruckverfahren, in which jobs from different customers are grouped on shared press sheets.

German Wikipedia describes Flyeralarm GmbH as a mid-sized online printer wholly owned by its founder, who is also its managing director. It gives the workforce as about 700 people in administration and about 1,800 in production as of 2023, and says most products are made in Germany, at 15 production sites in Lower Franconia, the Mainfranken region, and around Dresden. Beyond Germany, it lists branches in twelve further European countries, from Austria and Italy to Sweden and Romania, plus an office in Dubai.

From flyers to drink cans.

The range grew outward from the flyer in the company’s name. German Wikipedia lists posters, flyers, calendars and brochures among the products printed with a high degree of automation, and adds that Flyeralarm also prints on drink cans, flags and truck tarpaulins. The company’s website says customers can choose from more than three million promotional products and design them online, and it offers sample packs and sample books of its papers.

Expansion came in steps. In 2013 Flyeralarm began making photo products, mainly personalised photo books; in 2014 it added Switzerland and Belgium to markets that already included Britain, Italy, France and Spain, and launched My3D, a brand for 3D-printed figures. In autumn 2015 it announced a move into textile printing, from T-shirts to fleece jackets and bistro aprons. A subsidiary, Flyeralarm Menu Design, took the exclusive European sales rights for the American Boxerbrand menu covers and hotel-room folders in 2016, and Flyeralarm Packaging, for labels and packaging, followed in Greußenheim in 2017. A shop run with Deutsche Post since 2017 has traded as Flyeralarm Mailings since 2021, and in 2022 the company set up Flyeralarm Digital, which develops marketing software, all according to German Wikipedia.

Trade observers have followed that breadth. Writing on beyond-print.de in April 2024, the online-print consultant Bernd Zipper counted Flyeralarm among the six largest online print companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, credited it with a “360-degree” product strategy, and pointed to a then-new joint online platform with the paper maker Gmund. German Wikipedia lists the company’s awards, among them the Bavarian founders’ prize in its “Aufsteiger” category in 2008, the Deutscher Fairness-Preis every year from 2014 to 2023, the Bavarian print prize in 2018, and the title of innovative online printer of the year at the Druck & Medien Awards in 2020. It also names partnerships with the German printing and media industries federation, the Bundesverband Druck und Medien, and with the mid-sized business association BVMW.

Online printers and their pages.

Online printers and print-on-demand platforms sell something the customer designs and the company makes. Their websites are therefore built around two things: the range of printed products on offer, and the steps for turning a file or an idea into an order. Product pages are organised by category — business cards, flyers and postcards, stickers and labels, signs and banners, packaging, apparel, and fabric or home goods — and each is shown through the company’s own photographs of finished pieces.

The ordering side is described in plain, practical terms. Customers either upload a finished print file or build a design in an editor that runs in the web browser, then choose size, quantity, paper and finish from a configurator. Cimpress, for example, describes its services as running from upload-and-print to logo design, with file checks before production. Papers and finishes are named rather than pictured in the abstract: weights in grams per square metre, coated or uncoated stock, matt or gloss lamination, and options such as rounded corners or spot varnish.

Behind the storefront, the companies differ in how they make things. Some run their own print plants; CEWE described SAXOPRINT’s Dresden site as a production facility when it agreed to sell it to Cimpress in May 2026. Others, such as HelloPrint in Rotterdam, describe themselves as platforms that pass orders to a network of partner printers and carriers. Several of the brands in this guide belong to larger groups, and their corporate pages set out owners, sites and the dates of takeovers.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, where its products are made and how it presents itself — and attributes to the company anything that rests only on its own word.

A wordmark on pitch-side boards and in a league logo.

Much of Flyeralarm’s public visibility comes from sport. German Wikipedia lists it as a partner of FC Bayern Basketball and of the Austrian football club Admira Wacker Mödling, and as a pitch-side advertiser at German men’s national team matches; from 2013 to 2021 it was a partner of the women’s national team. From 2019 to 2023 it was the naming sponsor of the women’s Bundesliga and of the rowing Bundesliga.

The women’s league deal is the clearest record of the Flyeralarm name used as a design element. When the German football association, the DFB, announced the sponsorship in May 2019, the design blog Design Tagebuch reported that the Flyeralarm lettering had been built into a new league logo, to be worn on players’ shirts from the 2019/20 season, and that the DFB’s green and its emblem had been taken out of the mark. Its editor, Achim Schaffrinna, called the result the kind of compromise that naming deals produce, while judging it an improvement on the previous logo. The same piece described Flyeralarm, founded in Würzburg in 2002, as one of the largest online printers in Europe, and noted that the stadium of the Würzburger Kickers carried the printer’s name.

On its own website the company writes its name in capitals, FLYERALARM, and presents itself as an online printer and marketing partner for businesses, offering services such as videos and digital marketing alongside print. It also says it has won the Deutscher Fairness-Preis ten times.

For a design guide, Flyeralarm shows how an online printer can carry a single wordmark from the order page to stadium boards and a league logo. Compare Onlineprinters, another large German online printer, and Saxoprint in Dresden. For this guide we use a signal yellow, ink black and paper white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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