Gerstaecker Brand Guidelines: The Eitorf Mail-Order House for Artists’ Materials

From children’s art games to a mail-order catalogue.

Gerstaecker began with games, not paint. According to the company’s own history page and German Wikipedia (revised in February 2025), its founder Johannes Gerstäcker started out in the early 1950s making and selling educational art games for children of primary-school age. The idea sold well enough that he built a mail-order structure around it, and in 1953 the firm was founded; German Wikipedia names it the Johannes Gerstaecker Verlag, a publishing house, which is still the company’s name today.

The range widened quickly. The first catalogues appeared at the start of the 1960s, and the company says they already carried lines that remain the core of its range: artists’ colours, art prints, glazes and soapstone, the soft carving stone that German Wikipedia notes is still widely used in schools. The company says its first warehouse held more than 4,000 products, and that its customers soon spread from schools to professional and amateur artists and makers of every kind.

Growth meant moving. A second warehouse went up beside the goods station at Eitorf on the river Sieg, a small town in the Cologne and Bonn area, as the company puts it, that remains its home. The company says the catalogue took its present form in 1982, at around 1,500 pages, aimed at professional and leisure artists and teachers who wanted to choose at home and have materials delivered. In 1991 the founder’s sons Michael and Christian Gerstäcker opened a new headquarters in the Eitorf business park, which the company describes as 5,000 square metres, with a range that had by then reached 10,000 articles.

The family name is written Gerstäcker, with an umlaut; the brand on catalogues, shops and websites is spelled Gerstaecker, and the company’s own history page sets it in capitals.

A catalogue, a warehouse and stores across Europe.

Gerstaecker’s centre of gravity is still the catalogue and the warehouse behind it. German Wikipedia describes a yearly main catalogue of about 1,400 pages, a compact catalogue, eight promotional brochures (two of them for schools) and a book brochure, together with eight online shops and a total range of more than 70,000 articles. The company gives the main catalogue as about 1,500 pages and calls itself Europe’s biggest mail-order business for artists’ materials; that is its own description.

The logistics centre followed in 2001. According to German Wikipedia, the Eitorf site now covers around 20,000 square metres, with 55,000 cubic metres of storage at a height of 11.5 metres, and handles orders for the company’s European branches; the company’s own page gives a figure of almost 18,000 square metres. At the end of 2002 the first Künstlerfachmarkt, or specialist artists’ store, opened next to it in Eitorf, with a framing workshop and a soapstone store, the company says.

Expansion abroad came at the same time. In 1999 Gerstaecker founded a French branch, Le Géant des Beaux-Arts, at Saverne in northern Alsace, and at the start of 2002 it added an English subsidiary, GreatArt, based at Alton, an hour south-west of London, according to both the company and German Wikipedia. Wikipedia also lists Gerstaecker Schweiz at Olten for Switzerland and Mondo Artista at Bolzano for Italy, and puts the group’s staff across Europe at around 250.

The stores spread from there. The company’s store page, read in November 2026, lists artists’ stores in Germany at Bremen, Dresden, Eitorf, Hamburg, Karlsruhe and Munich; in Austria at Dornbirn, Graz, Linz and Vienna; in the Netherlands at The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht; a run of Le Géant des Beaux-Arts stores in French cities from Bordeaux to Toulouse; and one GreatArt store in London’s Shoreditch. German Wikipedia says the stores average about 1,800 square metres, with their own framing departments, soapstone stores and book sections with coffee and reading corners, and that they hold regular courses, exhibitions, demonstrations and workshops.

How art-supply chains present themselves.

Art-supply retail chains sell materials made by other companies, so much of their identity lives in the shop itself: the sign over the door, the name on the carrier bag, the catalogue cover and the colours of a website. The chains in this guide come from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Canada and Singapore, and each presents that identity in its own way, often in a name its founders or owners chose decades ago.

Store formats vary widely. Some chains run large stores on the edge of town; German Wikipedia gives the average sales area of a Boesner branch as about 3,000 square metres. Others keep compact shops in city centres or near art schools, and several run both, alongside web shops that now carry most of their range.

Print still matters in this trade. Gerstaecker, which began in Eitorf in 1953, built its business on a mail-order catalogue that the company says took its present form in 1982, and Boesner publishes its own catalogue and customer magazines. Chains also name their own-label ranges and services, such as framing workshops, and many describe courses, demonstrations and workshops held in their stores; where this guide repeats such descriptions, they are given as the companies’ own words.

Corporate pages tell the rest of the story: who founded each chain, who owns it now and how it grew, through new stores, sister chains abroad or changes of owner. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company, separates documented facts from what the company says about itself, and states plainly where a chain has changed hands or closed.

A publisher, a mail-order house and a family of shop names.

The word Verlag in the company name is not only history. German Wikipedia lists technique books issued under the Gerstäcker imprint in Eitorf, among them a guide to screen printing for schools and studios from 1976, a book on etching in its third edition in 1980, and later titles on watercolour painting in 2006 and lithography in 2007. Printmaking materials, from linocut and copperplate inks to screen-printing colours, still sit in the shop’s range alongside paints, brushes, canvas and paper.

Today the business is run by Johannes Gerstäcker Verlag GmbH in Eitorf. In November 2025 the company announced that its management team had grown to four managing directors, with Peter Schnur-Kamita as chief executive, in a statement published by the Bonn/Rhein-Sieg chamber of commerce; the statement framed the change around logistics and the future of the Eitorf site. The company’s sustainability page says it has been FSC-certified since April 2021, that its catalogues are printed on recycled paper and that it reuses old cartons as packing material; those are its own statements.

The group trades under several names. In Germany, Austria and the Netherlands the stores and web shops carry the Gerstaecker name; in France the same group is Le Géant des Beaux-Arts, in England GreatArt, and in Italy Mondo Artista, according to German Wikipedia. Several of the stores also keep older local names, such as a Hamburg shop run by an artists’ supplier listed under its own company name and a Utrecht shop that adds the name Swaak, according to the company’s store list.

For a design guide, Gerstaecker shows how a mail-order catalogue can carry a brand across borders while the shop signs change from country to country. Compare Le Géant des Beaux-Arts, its French sister chain, and Boesner, another German art-supply group. For this guide we use a deep teal, a warm paper white and an ochre orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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