Gosselin Brand Guidelines: An Antwerp Mover Since 1930, Still Family-Owned

An Antwerp removals firm from 1930.

Gosselin began in Antwerp in 1930, when Lambert Vivet started a small moving company there, according to the group’s own history. The company describes those beginnings as “one man and one truck.” The name it carries today arrived two decades later: in 1950, the group says, Dolf Gosselin joined the business, which then became Vivet-Gosselin.

The sources used for this guide do not say how the company operated during the occupation of 1940–1944.

The next turning point, in the group’s telling, came in 1976, when Marc Smet joined. In 1984 he created Gosselin Worldwide Moving, which the company presents as the start of its international business. More companies followed in the late 1980s and the 1990s: a handling and distribution business and an Italian office in Vicenza in 1988; Gosselin Export Packers, a maker of plywood boxes for shipping, in 1995; and North Atlantic Services, set up in 1996 as an ocean freight carrier that does not operate its own vessels.

The group calls its defining step the purchase in 1999 of the Corstjens Worldwide Movers Group, based in the Netherlands, which brought 19 offices across the Netherlands and Central and Eastern Europe. That, the company says, established Gosselin as a truly international organisation.

From removals to a logistics group.

After 2000 Gosselin built up freight, terminals and storage alongside moving. The company lists an airfreight division at Brussels Airport and Gosselin Swiss in 2000; the Gosselin Container Terminal, beside the Albert Canal near the port of Antwerp, in 2002; and the arrival in 2003 of Nomad Express, an Antwerp-based firm with offices across the Caucasus and Central Asia, now Gosselin Caucasus & Central Asia. In 2007 it reorganised into two divisions, Gosselin Moving and Gosselin Logistics, and in 2011 Vivet-Gosselin and the Caucasus business merged into Gosselin Mobility, now Gosselin Moving. The same decade brought forwarding and port businesses: the company says it acquired the forwarder ART and Focus Transport Services in 2004, founded Nedvan International in Antwerp that year, built a new warehouse and offices in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2006, and added Pasec Port, a specialist in lashing and securing cargo, in 2009. Crosstainer, bought in 2012, added freight forwarding to and from China.

The group kept adding sites and companies. It says it acquired the former Crown Cork site in Deurne, with 7.2 hectares of land and 32,000 square metres of warehousing, in 2013, and opened Gosselin Self Storage in Deurne in 2014. In 2017 it bought DT Moving, with offices in London and Paris, and the international moving activities of the Swiss firm Packimpex, with offices in Bern, Basel, Geneva and Zurich. It took full control of the project-cargo business Heavy Group in 2021, after a joint venture that began in 2014. The same year it bought MEYS Moving of Brasschaat, with its self-storage business, and the Milcobel site in Schoten.

Gosselin also appears in a European competition case. On 11 March 2008 the European Commission announced fines on ten providers of international removal services in Belgium, Gosselin among them, for fixing prices, sharing the market and rigging bids for international “door-to-door” removals to and from Belgium between October 1984 and September 2003. The Commission said the companies had presented customers with bogus “cover quotes” and paid each other “commissions” for lost bids, which it described as a hidden element of the final price, and that it had uncovered the cartel on its own initiative.

How movers present themselves.

Moving and relocation companies present themselves in two registers at once. One is physical: vans, trailers, crates and containers that carry a company’s name along streets and across borders. The other is corporate: service pages, client portals, apps and reports written for the human-resources and mobility teams that commission employee moves.

Livery is the older of the two. American van-line names such as Allied and North American date from 1928 and 1933, according to English Wikipedia, and groups that later bought them have kept those names in use: SIRVA, formed in 1998 and 1999, still lists Allied and northAmerican as brands in their own right on its website. Crate and container work shows up in the service lists themselves: SIRVA’s website menus separate household-goods, commercial and specialty moving, and a May 2026 Cartus release lists fine-art wrapping and transportation, temperature-controlled wine shipping and pet transportation among the services of its executive programme.

The corporate side is mostly software and programme names. Cartus lists its CartusMobile app and its MovePro360 hub in its own timeline, and SIRVA lists a technology platform, Connect+, beside its relocation services; both describe home sale and purchase, temporary housing, immigration and destination support as parts of one managed programme for an employer.

Corporate pages carry the rest of the story: networks of agents and partners, owners, offices and depots, and the countries served. Those figures change with each acquisition, merger or refinancing, so this guide gives them only with the date and the source that reported them, and marks clearly what rests on a company’s own word.

Still family-owned, nearly a century on.

Recent growth has come mainly through acquisitions. The group lists UniMove in Rotterdam, Antwerp Cargo Movers, the forwarder Frey & Klein and the Delcatrans Group among its recent additions, alongside a new office in Berlin and a terminal at Genk-Zuid on the Albert Canal. In Britain, the accountancy firm Saffery, which advised on the deal, reported on 16 May 2025 that Gosselin had acquired the Doree Bonner International Group, a moving business with 11 branches across the UK, as part of a plan to strengthen its presence in the UK market. Joint ventures have widened the offer too: with Transmoove, an office-moving specialist based in Vilvoorde, near Brussels, and with Archivault. In Italy, Gosselin Vicenza moved into a larger facility in Brendola and took port logistics and customs declarations in-house, the group says. In 2025, the group says, it became the logistics and moving partner of Team Belgium for the Olympic Games.

Gosselin describes itself today as a family business, still run by the family that built it, four generations on, with 56 offices in 34 countries and more than 1,500 people, according to its website. It presents itself as a group of specialist companies rather than one firm: moving, logistics, self storage in Antwerp, container storage in the port of Antwerp and in Switzerland, and archiving and data destruction through Archivault. Its business ethics page says it introduced a code of conduct for all employees and activities in 2004, audited externally every year. Its own phrase for its age is “nearly a century.”

For a design guide, Gosselin shows how a family removals name can stretch across a group of specialist companies, each named for the job it does. Compare Interdean, another mover named in the 2008 Belgian case, and Crown Relocations. For this guide we use harbour green, deep teal, a quay grey and a plywood tan with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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