GEO Brand Guidelines: A 1986 Toyota Video Shop, a Borrowed Earth Name and a 2026 Rename

A video shop and a borrowed name.

GEO started as a single video-rental shop. Japanese Wikipedia dates its origin to June 1986, when its founder, Yuki Endo, opened Video Roadshow Misato, a rental shop in Toyota, Aichi Prefecture. In April 1988 he turned the business into a company, AV Station. The listed parent’s own corporate record starts a little later: the Nagoya Stock Exchange gives its date of establishment as 10 January 1989.

The name came from outside. Japanese Wikipedia says “GEO” was first a brand of Espo Communications, used in the 1980s and early 1990s for its rental-video shops, property and office-equipment businesses. In December 1989 AV Station was renamed Geo Mirda, joined the Espo group and began using GEO as its shop name. It became independent of Espo in 1992, signed a contract in April 1995 to take over the GEO trademark, which was transferred in July 1997, and in November 1995 the operating company took the name GEO Corporation. The same article says the name is a Latin-style reading of “geo,” meaning the earth.

Growth came largely through shops bought from others. In November 1999 GEO bought Japan Blockbuster from Fujita Shoten, and in July 2001 it took over 131 media shops from the Towa group, Japanese Wikipedia says; it also converted the stores of companies in rehabilitation into GEO shops. It listed on Nasdaq Japan in Osaka in November 2000 and on the first sections of the Tokyo and Nagoya stock exchanges in January 2004. In July 2004 it opened its first GEO shop outside Japan, in California, and by December 2005, with a store at Shimanto in Kochi, it had shops in all 47 prefectures.

Rental, games and a yellow sign.

A GEO shop mixes rental with buying and selling. The Nagoya Stock Exchange’s September 2026 summary describes the group’s GEO stores as buying and selling games, smartphones and appliances, selling new games, and renting DVDs, CDs and comics. In a February 2025 announcement reported by 4Gamer.net, GEO described itself as running about 1,000 shops from Hokkaido to Okinawa, offering films, music, games and books in three ways: rental, reuse and new sale.

The chain moved online early. In June 2009 GEO opened its portal, GEO Online, and in July 2009 began a postal DVD rental service run by its subsidiary Posren, Japanese Wikipedia says; in October 2009 it announced that it would join Ponta, the shared points scheme of Lawson and Mitsubishi Corporation.

Rental has also moved beyond discs. From 28 February 2025, 4Gamer.net reported, about 400 GEO shops and the online service GEO Arekore Rental began renting PlayStation 5 consoles; Arekore Rental itself, which lends cameras, smartphones and appliances, started in November 2019. Japanese Wikipedia adds smartphone and tablet rental at 15 shops from November 2025, and a new format, GEO Digital Base, which opened in Nagoya’s Tempaku ward in March 2026. Used phones are sold under the GEO mobile name, which Business Insider Japan counted among the group’s reuse businesses in 2025.

The chain’s look is easy to recall. Business Insider Japan wrote in August 2025 that many people in Japan, hearing the name GEO, picture its yellow and dark-blue logo mark, and that the company had grown up as a rental-video chain. The tones in this guide are our own, chosen to echo that pairing without copying the mark.

Design and documentation.

Japan’s second-hand, hobby, book and sports chains tend to present themselves through the store itself before any logo. Many of them grew from a single shop, and their corporate pages often open with that first branch, the town it stood in and the year it opened, followed by a timeline of new formats, franchise agreements and listings on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

In second-hand retail, the buying counter is as much a part of the identity as the sales floor. Chains publish what they buy, how customers can bring goods in or send them by post, and which stores take which categories, from books and CDs to trading cards, toys, clothing and electronics. Some run separate buying-only centres or online services alongside their shops, and describe these on the same corporate pages as their stores.

Hobby and collector chains lean on display and naming. Shops are often split into small rooms or annexes, each with its own name and a single subject, such as manga for one readership, vinyl figures or vintage toys, so that a sign at the door tells a visitor what lies inside. Book chains, by contrast, describe long aisles, broad stock and space to browse, and some have used bright lighting and open layouts to make used books look like new retail. Mascots and capitalised store names appear on signs, bags and advertising.

Behind the shop fronts sit corporate structures that the companies set out in plain terms: founders, holding companies, parent groups, franchisees and shareholders, along with overseas stores that opened, moved or closed. The guides in this group follow those published histories, and treat colours and typefaces as an unofficial interpretation rather than an official brand standard.

A parent renamed after its resale arm.

GEO has changed its corporate form several times. On 1 November 2011 the company moved to a holding structure and became GEO Holdings, creating a new GEO Corporation to run the shops, Japanese Wikipedia says. The group grew in resale: it took a stake in For-You, the company behind 2nd STREET, in 2006, made it a subsidiary in 2008 and took full ownership in 2010, and in 2019 bought OKURA, a reseller of designer brand goods, a purchase Business Insider Japan also dates to 2019. Since an April 2020 reorganisation, GEO Store Co., Ltd. has run the GEO media shops and a separate 2nd STREET company the resale stores, both under the same parent, according to Japanese Wikipedia.

In 2026 the parent took a new name. GEO Holdings became 2nd RETAILING Co., Ltd. on 1 October 2026, and on the same day its shares were listed on the Premier market of the Nagoya Stock Exchange alongside its existing Tokyo Stock Exchange Prime listing, according to the exchange’s new-listing summary of 24 September 2026. The head office is in Naka-ku, Nagoya. Japanese Wikipedia says the change was announced on 25 July 2025 and approved at the shareholders’ meeting in June 2026. The group’s president told Business Insider Japan that the old group name no longer described the business well, that the “second” comes from “second-hand,” and that the group would keep its rental business. The GEO name stays on the shops: it is the media-shop brand, while 2nd RETAILING is the holding company.

For a design guide, GEO shows how a short, borrowed word on a bright sign can outlast the format it was made for, as a video-rental chain becomes a shop for games, phones and second-hand goods. Compare 2nd STREET, its sister chain in the same group, and Tsutaya, another Japanese media retailer. For this guide we use a marquee yellow and an ink blue with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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