Krka Brand Guidelines: A 1954 Novo mesto Laboratory, Enap & Listings in Ljubljana and Warsaw

A pharmacy laboratory on a bend of the Krka River.

Krka was founded in Novo mesto, in south-eastern Slovenia, on 23 April 1954, as the Krka Pharmaceutical Laboratory. The company says it was set up on the initiative of Boris Andrijanič, the director of the town’s district pharmacy, and English and Slovene Wikipedia agree on the year and the founder. Novo mesto lies on a bend of the Krka River, close to the border with Croatia, English Wikipedia says.

The company presents its story as part of a much older pharmacy tradition. Wikipedia says Novo mesto’s first regional pharmacy was founded in 1570 and ran continuously for 380 years, until it was nationalised in 1950 and renamed the Novo mesto Town Pharmacy. The laboratory started with nine workers, Wikipedia says, and within two years had grown into a pharmaceutical factory; in 1956, the company says, it was renamed Tovarna zdravil Krka, a factory of medicines. Regular production began in the autumn of 1954 in two small laboratories in the centre of the town.

Krka grew inside Yugoslavia. The company says that only five years after its founding it ranked among the top five pharmaceutical companies in the country, that it filed its first patent application, for an antidiabetic called Tolbusal, in 1959, and that in 1962 it opened a new production plant with laboratories at Ločna in Novo mesto, which remains its main production site. In 1975, the company says, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the production of its first antibiotics; Wikipedia dates its first FDA registrations, for antibiotic production, to the late 1970s.

From licensed products to its own generics.

In its early decades Krka filled out its range with licensed products. In the early 1980s it changed course, Wikipedia says, towards developing its own generic medicines; the company dates that decision to 1981, when it drafted the approval documents for its first generic medicine containing nifedipine. In 1988 it obtained marketing authorisation for Enap, a blood-pressure medicine that the company calls its flagship product for many decades.

The break-up of Yugoslavia changed its markets. The company says it began targeting Western European markets “as a response to social and political changes,” and that by the mid-1990s more than 70% of its products were exported. Today, Wikipedia says, Krka sells in more than 70 countries, with the Russian Federation, Poland and Germany as its biggest markets. Its main product group is generic prescription medicines marketed under its own brands, followed by non-prescription products and animal health products, mainly for pets.

Krka is also a chemical producer. Wikipedia says it mainly makes known active ingredients through its own synthesis processes, and makes single pills that combine two or more active ingredients. The company says its API plant Sinteza 4 opened at Ločna in 2007, that a further plant, Sinteza 1, opened at Krško in 2015, the same year the Notol 2 plant at Ločna started production, and that in 2013 it introduced its first oncology medicine, Meaxin. In 2018, the company says, the Slovenian business daily Finance named it Factory of the Year.

Krka also runs a business outside medicine. Its subsidiary Terme Krka operates spas and hotels at Dolenjske Toplice, Šmarješke Toplice, Strunjan on the coast and Otočec; the first two came under Krka’s management in 1973 and 1974, the company says.

Generic medicine makers.

Generic-medicine makers sell products that are, by design, meant to match medicines already on the market. That leaves their visual identity with an unusual job: it has to signal reliability and scale rather than novelty, and it often has to work on thousands of packs at once.

The pictures these companies publish tend to repeat a small set of scenes. There are close-ups of blister packs and plain white tablets, shot clean and bright against pale backgrounds. There are pharmacists at a counter handing a box across to a customer, a moment that puts a person between the product and the patient. And there are wide views of large production sites, with long corridors, stainless steel and staff in white coats and hairnets, used to suggest capacity and control.

Packaging is where the system shows most clearly. Because one company may carry a very large range of molecules and strengths, its packs usually rely on a fixed layout with colour bands, stripes or blocks that separate one product or dose from another, while the company name stays in the same place on every box. Corporate material then widens the frame: maps, globes and lines linking continents, meant to picture supply reaching many countries.

The same language appears on the trade-show floor. At industry fairs such as CPHI, where ingredient suppliers, contract manufacturers and generics companies meet, stands lean on large logos, simple colour fields and photographs of laboratories and plants. For a designer, the category is a study in restraint: a clear name, a disciplined colour system and imagery that keeps attention on trust and access.

Ljubljana, Warsaw and plants in five countries.

Krka became a public limited company through privatisation in the 1990s. The company says its initial public offering took place in December 1994, that in 1996 and 1997 it became the largest public limited company in Slovenia, with more than 90,000 shareholders, and that its shares have been listed on the Ljubljana Stock Exchange under the symbol KRKG since 1997. In April 2012 it added a listing on the Warsaw Stock Exchange: the exchange announced on 11 April 2012, in a release carried by Mondo Visione, that Krka was the 40th foreign company on its Main Market and the second Slovenian company on the exchange. Wikipedia names Miloš Kovačič as chairman of the management board from 1985 and Jože Colarič, the third, from 2005; the company still names Colarič as president of the management board and chief executive.

Krka makes most of its medicines itself. The company says production takes place at the parent company in Slovenia — Wikipedia lists sites at Ločna and Bršljin in Novo mesto, Krško, Šentjernej and Ljutomer — and at subsidiaries in the Russian Federation, Poland, Croatia and Germany, with production in China in long-term leased facilities. Its first plant outside Slovenia opened in Poland in 2001, followed by Krka-Rus in Russia in 2003 and a plant at Jastrebarsko in Croatia in 2005; in 2007 it bought the German company TAD Pharma, and in 2017 it formed the Ningbo Krka Menovo joint venture in China, the company says. English Wikipedia notes that Krka continues to operate in Russia despite the invasion of Ukraine and international sanctions. The company says it had 13,261 employees at the end of March 2026.

For a design guide, Krka shows a regional laboratory turning into an international generic-medicine maker while keeping the name of its home river. Compare Sandoz, another European generic-medicine maker, and Viatris. For this guide we use a river green, a slate blue and limestone neutrals with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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