A small start in Punjab’s industrial city.

Kangaro comes from Ludhiana, the industrial city in the Indian state of Punjab. The company’s own account is brief: “The Kangaro Group was established by Lala Shri Janki Dass Jain in 1959,” it says, describing “a humble start at Ludhiana” that grew into a stationery manufacturing organisation. Its website carries the line “Since 1959” in its title. Some trade directories give the year as 1958; the company itself uses 1959.

The account names a founder and a city but gives no further detail of the early years, and the brand is thinly covered outside its own materials. What follows therefore rests largely on the company’s word, and is attributed to it.

The group still runs its business from Ludhiana. Its contact page lists an administrative office in an industrial area of the city and a registered office in New Delhi, where it also places its research and development centre. The brand is spelled Kangaro, with a single “o” at the end.

The company presents itself as a group rather than a single firm, and calls Kangaro its brand across a range that has widened over the years from the stapler outward to most of the small mechanical tools on an office desk.

Staplers first, then the whole desk.

Staplers are at the centre of the range. The company lists staplers, stapling pliers, staples and staple removers, alongside paper perforators and binder punches, paper cutters, tape dispensers, file clips, lever-arch mechanisms and numbering machines. It says a broad range of tackers and heavy-duty staples is also made in house, and its catalogue now reaches further, to scissors, glue sticks, calculators and computer accessories.

The company’s own help pages show the practical knowledge behind a stapler. They explain that ten sheets of standard 80 g/m² paper are about one millimetre thick, and that the right staple leg is the height of the stack plus about three millimetres; a staple that is too long leaves its ends sticking out. They also set out the difference between a standard, or parallel, clinch — where the staple legs curl up to bind the papers — and a flat clinch, where the legs are bent and pressed flat so that stapled documents lie flatter in a file. And they advise using the company’s own staples, warning that badly formed staples will not feed along the magazine.

The same pages describe two further modes. In temporary pinning the staple pierces the papers but its legs stay straight, so the set can be taken apart and rearranged later; in tacking the papers are stapled to a flat surface. The company notes that its staplers load in different ways — from the top, where a strip of staples is dropped in, from the front, where the magazine pops open, or from the back, where a tray slides out — and that it offers a selection of jam-clearing staplers from which a stuck staple can be removed easily. It also says that worn punching discs and cutting dies on its heavy-duty punches can be replaced with spare parts from the company.

Design, the company says, is done in its own centre. It describes an integrated set-up in which design and engineering, tool and die manufacturing and testing and validation are all handled in house, using CAD, CAM and CAE software for 3D modelling and tool-path generation, and says its designers pay particular attention to ergonomics. It adds that inspection and testing are part of the same in-house process, and that its staplers are tested with its own staples.

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.

A group that sells at home and abroad.

Kangaro sells to two markets. At home, the company says, a sales and marketing network covers India, reaching households and offices as well as companies, government departments and educational institutions. It describes a retail approach it calls “Face on Display,” in which products are shown face-out in shops so that buyers can pick them out at a glance.

Abroad, the company says exports make up a considerable share of its volume. It markets its range through international trade exhibitions, naming fairs in Brazil, China, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United States, and says its products are exported around the world. Its website is offered in a range of languages, including Arabic, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

On ownership, the company presents Kangaro as the brand of the Kangaro Group, still identified with its founder’s name and with Ludhiana. On where products are made, its claim is that manufacturing, tooling and testing are done in its own facilities; it does not set out factory locations in detail, so that claim is given here as the company’s own. For buyers, the company says, a manual for each product is published on that model’s page of its website, and its help pages answer common questions about capacity, jams and loading.

For a design guide, Kangaro shows how a stapler maker can build a brand on a single, hard-working object and widen it to the whole desk. Compare Rexel, the London stapler maker, and Swingline, the New York maker behind the red 747. For this guide we use a stapler red, a steel grey and a black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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