Kitco Brand Guidelines: A 1977 Montreal Scrap-Metal Business, Kitco News & an Ingot Logo

A Montreal metals buyer that went online early.

Kitco is the trading name of Kitco Metals Inc., a precious-metals company with its head office in Montreal. The company dates itself to 1977, when, its corporate site says, Bart Kitner launched a scrap precious-metals business with a small loan. Bitcoin.com News, reporting on the company in August 2021, told the same story: Kitner began trading gold in the 1970s with borrowed money and built the business into a large precious-metals firm.

The scrap trade is still the base. Kitco calls refining “the original division” of the company and says it has served businesses since 1977, buying recycled gold, silver and other metals from jewellers, pawn shops, antique dealers, manufacturers and dental laboratories.

What changed the company’s profile was the internet. Kitco’s timeline says it launched Kitco.com in 1995, and that the site quickly became a place to look up quotes, charts and data on the precious-metals markets. The timeline adds that in 2006 Kitco.com received a web award from Forbes, and that in 2007, its 30th anniversary year, the company opened an office in Hong Kong and launched a Chinese-language site.

Mobile came next. In 2008, the company says, it released the Kcast and Gold Live! families of apps, which carried its prices and charts to phones. Today its corporate site lists offices in Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver, New York and Hong Kong, more than 120 employees, and customers in more than 80 countries.

Kitco Media and Kitco News.

In 2010, the company says, it launched Kitco Media, a division for digital content and data that made Kitco News a source of commodities-market information. Kitco Media now groups Kitco News with Kitco Mining, Kitco Crypto and Kitco Education, among other initiatives. The company says Kitco News is headquartered in Montreal, with bureaus in New York, Hong Kong and Vancouver, and that it covers precious metals, mining, commodities, cryptocurrencies, equity markets and the wider economy in written, video and audio form, on Kitco.com, YouTube and the Kitco apps.

Kitco’s media side has moved with its readers. The company says it began covering cryptocurrency in 2019 with a live price app, and Kitco Mining presents breaking news on the mining industry alongside live base-metal and mining-share prices, with interviews with mining chief executives and investors. Kitco Media also lists Kitco Reach and the Kitco apps among its parts, and the company states its media goal as helping people make informed investment decisions through timely news, analysis and interviews.

The precious-metals division sells bars and coins in gold, silver, platinum, palladium and rhodium, sourced from other mints, along with collectibles such as coloured silver coins and silver art bars. Kitco says it offers allocated storage in Canada, including at the Royal Canadian Mint, in its own facilities in Hong Kong, and at a COMEX-approved depository in the United States, and works with retirement-account custodians in Canada and the United States. Its collectibles line, the company says, includes pieces it sources and creates itself, among them silver rounds and gift items made from 99.99 per cent gold.

It has also experimented with digital gold. Kitco says that in 2018 it launched VaultChain with Tradewind, a platform for buying and selling physical gold and silver held at the Royal Canadian Mint and recorded on a blockchain ledger. In August 2021, Bitcoin.com News reported, Kitco announced Kitco Gold (KGLD), an Ethereum token meant to represent one troy ounce of fine gold, built with Tradewind Markets, First Digital Trust and Stably, with attestation by the accounting firm Cohen & Company. The report said the gold behind the tokens would be held in DirectReserve vaults, that the token’s value would follow the spot gold price in real time, and that Kitco said its standard Ethereum format made it easy to add to exchanges and digital wallets.

Bars, coins and the language of assay.

Bullion dealers, refiners and mints sell goods that are deliberately standardised: a one-ounce coin or a kilo bar is defined by its metal, weight and purity before any design choice is made. So their identities live in a narrow set of places — the way products are photographed, the marks struck into the metal, the shop interface and the pages that explain who owns whom.

Product photography in this category is usually plain and repetitive by design. Companies tend to show each coin or bar on its own against a light or neutral background, often obverse and reverse side by side, sometimes still in a sealed card or capsule, so that the buyer can read the design, the weight and the fineness at a glance. Special editions are told apart by small details, such as the privy marks that mints add to coins for a particular dealer or occasion.

On the metal itself, the hallmark does the branding. A refiner’s bar typically carries its maker’s mark, its weight, its fineness and a serial number, and minted bars are often sold in an assay card that repeats those details. Accreditation is part of the same language: English Wikipedia, for example, lists the Swiss refiner MKS PAMP on the London Bullion Market Association and London Platinum and Palladium Market Good Delivery lists.

Online, the price chart sits close to the logo. Gold.com, the owner of JM Bullion, runs a strip of gold, silver, platinum and palladium prices across the top of its corporate site, and JM Bullion has kept separate sites named for gold and silver prices. Corporate pages carry the rest of the story: Gold.com publishes a year-by-year timeline of its acquisitions, and Bullion International Group, the owner of APMEX, signs its site “An MKS PAMP GROUP Company,” linking a retail name to a refinery.

A pyramid of ingots.

Kitco has published the thinking behind its current logo. On its corporate site the company describes the mark as a pyramid of gold ingots joined by connected lines: the clean drawing of the ingots stands for simplicity, the lines for its commitment to customers and employees, and the pyramid shape, which it compares with the pyramids and gold’s long history, for strength and endurance. The company says the colour scheme reflects the metals it trades and reports on. The same page presents the logo with the line “45 years and counting.”

That double identity — dealer and publisher — shapes how the brand looks in use. Kitco.com carries live prices and charts for gold and the other metals, in several currencies, beside news and opinion pages. The shop sits on a separate address, online.kitco.com, and the Hong Kong business uses its own sites.

The company also presents itself as an employer. It says it was certified by Great Place To Work Canada in 2023, and its corporate site gives its careers, values and leadership team pages alongside the precious-metals, refining and media divisions.

For a design guide, Kitco shows how a metals dealer can become a media brand without dropping the trading floor from its look. Compare Sprott Money, another Canadian bullion dealer, and APMEX, an online bullion seller. For this guide we use graphite, an ingot gold and a silver grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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