A bookseller’s stationery wholesale in Schöneberg.

Herlitz began as a trading business, not a factory. German Wikipedia traces it to a paper and stationery wholesale founded by Carl Herlitz, a trained bookseller, in Berlin-Schöneberg; the company marked its centenary in 2004, and the sole proprietorship Carl Herlitz first appears in the Berlin address book in 1905 among agents for out-of-town paper and office-supply houses. After Carl Herlitz withdrew from the business in 1935, his son Günter Herlitz took it over and extended sales into the Mark Brandenburg.

The war years interrupted everything. German Wikipedia says the firm’s premises were destroyed twice in November 1943. In the summer of 1945 Günter Herlitz restarted the business, at first from cellar rooms in Berlin-Moabit. During the Berlin Blockade of 1948–49 the firm brought in goods by air from West Germany, according to the same account.

Manufacturing began out of necessity. After the events of 17 June 1953, when traditional suppliers in East Germany threatened to fall away, Herlitz started its own production of exercise books, drawing pads, letter pads, index cards and coloured-paper books, German Wikipedia says. For a time the wholesale side could only supply customers in West Berlin.

The breakthrough into the West German market came in 1960, which German Wikipedia dates with a report in Der Tagesspiegel. It came with notebooks and drawing pads whose covers carried pictures — animal motifs made with the zoologist Bernhard Grzimek and sports images with the broadcaster Harry Valérien. In 1973 Herlitz added a range featuring Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street, which Die Zeit reported on in January 1974.

From family firm to listed company to insolvency.

Herlitz grew into a full-range stationery group in the following decades. German Wikipedia records that the firm Carl Herlitz became a stock corporation in 1972, that the Herlitz AG emerged on 6 May 1976, and that the company floated on the Berlin stock exchange on 3 October 1977. Acquisitions widened the range: Paul Zoecke in Berlin brought greeting cards in 1978, and during the 1980s and early 1990s Herlitz bought makers of felt-tip pens, fountain pens, writing paper, albums, gift wrap and the humorous cards of Susy Card. The McPaper stationery shops began as franchises in the mid-1980s, and McPaper was sold to Deutsche Post in 1998.

Sales offices abroad followed from 1977 in Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland, and later in France, Poland, Finland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. A new distribution centre at Falkensee, just west of Berlin, was built from 1991 and went into operation in 1994.

Expansion then turned to crisis. German Wikipedia describes failed ventures in Russia and France in the later 1990s, and says that from summer 2001 a consortium of banks held a majority of the company. In April 2002 the Herlitz AG and several subsidiaries filed for insolvency, as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on 3 April 2002; the company’s own chronicle, preserved on the Wayback Machine, says the proceedings were completed in four months while trading continued. On 4 October 2005 a Luxembourg vehicle owned indirectly by the private-equity firm Advent International took a majority stake from the creditor banks.

The name itself is usually written in lower case: Pelikan Group’s own product listing gives the brand as “herlitz”, alongside Pelikan, Susy Card and Geha.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all office and school supply names: Novus, Herlitz, Durable, Kangaro, Maped, Jalema and Elba. Office and school supply brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger stationery groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a school shop to an office catalogue.

An office supply brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single stapler or folder than by a name, a colour and the packaging around it, because the company behind the name may have merged, changed hands or moved its production. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Pelikan, then Hamelin.

Pelikan came next. German Wikipedia says it became known in November 2009 that Herlitz would be taken over by Pelikan International, and that the German competition authority, the Bundeskartellamt, approved the takeover by Pelikan International Corporation Berhad of Puchong, Malaysia, in March 2010. In November 2013 Herlitz agreed to sell its remaining paper, office and stationery production to Pelikan, a sale completed on 1 March 2014. The Herlitz AG itself was then renamed: from 30 April 2015 it traded as Pelikan AG, and on 21 December 2017 it became Pelikan Group GmbH, German Wikipedia says, citing the company’s annual reports and the commercial register.

Under Pelikan, herlitz remained the name for paper products such as exercise books, writing pads and envelopes, for office items such as lever-arch files, folders and filing systems, and for school goods including school bags, rulers and compasses, according to German Wikipedia’s summary of the Pelikan Group range. Paper was made at Falkensee until 31 December 2019 and at Poznań in Poland.

The latest owner is French. In December 2023 the Bundeskartellamt cleared the purchase of Pelikan Group GmbH, together with Pelikan’s production company in Hannover, by the Hamelin group of Hérouville-Saint-Clair in Normandy, as the trade journal pbs report recorded. In June 2024, rbb24 reported that the Pelikan sales company would cease operating at the end of the year and that the Falkensee site would close. Since 1 January 2025 the Pelikan Group brands, herlitz among them, have been sold through Hamelin GmbH Deutschland, German Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, Herlitz shows how a stationery brand can be carried by the school year itself — exercise books, pads, folders and bags — while the company behind it changes hands. Compare Leitz, the Stuttgart maker of the lever-arch file, and Elba, the filing brand. For this guide we use an exercise-book blue, a pencil yellow and a paper white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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