Gremo Brand Guidelines: Ätran’s Green Thinning Forwarders, 1960s to Eco Log

A Danish start, a Halland village.

Gremo began in Denmark. The Swedish forestry paper Skogsaktuellt, in a December 2011 profile, wrote that a Danish entrepreneur founded the company in Frederikshavn in the 1960s and built its name from two others: his wife Grete and his younger brother Mogens. The Swedish Steel Prize, which shortlisted a Gremo machine in 2012, places the founding in the early 1960s. The first products were not forest machines at all: Skogsaktuellt says Gremo started out making dumper carts and trailers to be pulled behind tractors.

The move to Sweden came later. According to the same 2011 article, a Swedish family had bought Gremo a little over twenty years earlier and moved it to Ätran, an old railway-station village of fewer than 500 people in Halland, between Falkenberg and Smålandsstenar. The company had several owners over the years, with mixed fortunes, the paper wrote, until the Smålandsstenar industrial group Weland bought it in 2002. Swedish Wikipedia describes Weland, founded in 1947, as a maker of steel products such as spiral stairs and gratings, and lists Gremo in Ätran among the businesses it bought in the 2000s.

Under Weland the business settled. Skogsaktuellt reported that the design department was given substantial resources to keep up with what customers needed. It also described how all the work sat under one roof in Ätran: designers, assemblers and final inspectors worked side by side, and customers often visited the factory, which gave the engineers feedback straight from the people who drove the machines. Service partners from Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Switzerland and Austria travelled to Ätran to be trained.

The financial crisis of 2008 hit hard. The paper wrote that ten employees lost their jobs and that for three months not a single machine was sold; the site manager told it the company would not have come through without a strong owner. By 2011 business had recovered, helped by sales of used machines to Polish contractors, and about ten new hires had brought the workforce to 56.

Small forwarders for thinning.

Gremo built its name at the smaller end of forestry machinery, above all with forwarders for thinning: the machines that carry cut logs from the stand to the roadside. In 2011 Skogsaktuellt called the company the market leader in the thinning-forwarder segment. Its bestseller at the time, the paper said, was the 1050F, a development of the earlier 950F with compact dimensions and a low load height for tight stands; it could take bogie tracks front and rear for wet ground. The 1350 VT forwarder had a transmission with no gear changes, and the eight-wheeled 1050H harvester was meant for both thinning and final felling.

In 2012 Gremo’s 1450F forwarder was a nominee for the Swedish Steel Prize. The prize’s website says the nomination recognised a redesigned chassis built around high-strength steel, and that a prototype was then being tested in Swedish forests ahead of a planned launch in Europe and Russia in early 2013. The same page describes Gremo as based in the small town of Ätran in western Sweden and quotes the plant manager on the roughly 15,000 hours of development work behind the machine.

By the end of the 2010s the line-up had settled into a family of forwarders and one harvester. Forest Machine Magazine listed it in 2020 as the 750F, 1050F, 1250F and 1450F forwarders and the eight-wheeled 1058H5 thinning harvester. In 2023 the same magazine described the 750F and 1050F as machines for first, single-row thinnings and the larger 1250F as suited to second and final thinnings. It said Eco Log had reported that around 50 Gremo machines were made and sold each year.

Gremo also had a colour. The magazine’s 2023 account refers to “Gremo green” as the paintwork the machines carried before the brand ended. Green, set against the grey of steel and the pale bark of birch, is the starting point for our own palette.

Machines in the forest.

Forestry machine makers sell to a small, expert audience: logging contractors, forest companies and the operators who spend long shifts in the cab. Their imagery follows the work. Harvesters and forwarders are photographed in snow, in dense spruce stands and on soft ground, often from low angles that show the crane, the wheels and the load together, and many makers give equal space to the view from the operator’s seat: the cab interior, the controls and the screens of the measuring and control systems.

Paint does much of the branding. Machines are usually finished in a single strong colour, whether yellow, green or red, and makers tend to keep it through mergers and new names. When Komatsu Forest’s machines dropped the Valmet name in 2011, the company said their red would stay, the timber-trade news service Lesprom reported.

Many of these brands are tied to particular towns. In Finland and Sweden the factory and the head office often sit in the same place, sometimes in the community where the business began: Ponsse still builds every machine in Vieremä, in Northern Savonia, and Komatsu Forest has both its headquarters and its manufacturing in Umeå, in northern Sweden, according to the companies. Founding stories, early machines and local workshops feature prominently in their own histories.

The trade meets at working demonstrations rather than in showrooms. Fairs such as FinnMetko in Finland and Elmia Wood in Sweden bring makers, contractors and machines together, and makers time launches and road shows around them: Ponsse says almost 30,000 visitors came to Metko in 2008, and that an international tour in 2007 ended at the Elmia fair in Jönköping. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it and where its machines are made.

Gremo green turns yellow and grey.

The Gremo name did not survive the next consolidation. In 2020 Gremo merged with Eco Log of Söderhamn: EUWID Wood Products and Panels reported in 2023 that Eco Log Group was formed that year by joining Eco Log Sweden, Eco Log Försäljning, Gremo, Gremo Maskinservice of Ätran and the harvester-head maker SP Maskiner of Ljungby, with Weland among the group’s owners. Forest Machine Magazine dates the official end of the Gremo name to 17 April 2020.

After the merger the machines changed name and colour rather than design. In July 2020 Forest Machine Magazine reported that Eco Log would drop the 1450F, since it already had its own forwarder in that class, and keep the 750F, 1050F, 1250F and 1058H5 under the Eco Log name and paint scheme; Eco Log’s chief executive told the magazine that customers would recognise the machines’ functions beneath the new yellow. In 2023 the magazine wrote that production had moved from Ätran almost 700 km north to Eco Log’s factory in Söderhamn, and that the machines had gone from Gremo green to Eco Log’s yellow and grey.

The smaller forwarders’ future then narrowed. EUWID reported that on 16 February 2023 Eco Log announced it would stop building the forwarders with payloads of 8.5 to 12.5 tonnes that Gremo had originally developed, citing the investment needed at Söderhamn and limited sales potential, while saying it was developing a new model for that class. Its central European distributor told the paper the series would still be built and delivered in 2024, with no exact end date set. By then Eco Log itself had been through a reorganisation: in December 2022 Weland and the other owners sold all or part of their shares to the investment company Lazarus Industriförvaltning, EUWID wrote.

For a design guide, Gremo shows how a small maker’s name can be absorbed while its machines carry on in another company’s colours. Compare Eco Log, the Söderhamn maker that took over the range, and Rottne, another Swedish forest-machine maker. For this guide we use a deep forest green, warm grey and birch white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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