Laerdal Brand Guidelines: A 1940 Stavanger Publisher, Tomte Toys and Resusci Anne

Calendars, postcards and picture books first.

Laerdal began as a publisher, not a medical company. Norwegian Wikipedia says the Stavanger entrepreneur Åsmund S. Lærdal started Åsmund S. Lærdal forlag in 1940, publishing handbooks, calendars and postcards, and later picture books, activity books and jigsaw puzzles for children. English Wikipedia describes the early firm as a children’s publishing and toy company.

The firm’s first years fell under the German occupation of Norway, and the occupation reached it directly. Norwegian Wikipedia says that before Christmas 1942 the publisher issued a series of Christmas cards with openly patriotic, anti-occupation motifs. The German occupying authorities detained Lærdal, releasing him after a few days, and stopped the series, by which time about 750,000 of the cards had been distributed.

The business kept growing during the war. In 1943 Lærdal added a toy business, Tomte småvareindustri, which made wooden toys; Norwegian Wikipedia says that within three years it was regarded as the country’s largest toy maker. Illustrators including Henry Imsland, Jakob Sjøthun, Kurt Arnøy and Christian Kittilsen drew for the publisher’s puzzles, postcards, comics and picture books.

In the early 1950s the company began making toys in soft plastic. The Anne doll and the Tomte toy cars became popular and were exported widely from Stavanger, Norwegian Wikipedia says; English Wikipedia says more than 100 million Tomte cars had been sold in 100 countries by 1960, and that the Anne doll was named “Toy of the Year.” Writing in 2013, the BBC described Laerdal in those years as a successful Norwegian toy manufacturer that made children’s dolls and model cars from the new soft plastics.

From a soft-plastic doll to a training manikin.

That experience with plastics led to the product that now defines the brand. English Wikipedia says the Norwegian Civil Defence asked Laerdal to make realistic imitation wounds for training, and that in 1958 the Norwegian anaesthesiologist Bjørn Lind approached the company after learning from the physician Peter Safar of the need for a lifelike manikin to teach mouth-to-mouth ventilation. Together, Laerdal, Lind and Safar developed Resusci Anne, introduced in 1960, which English Wikipedia calls the world’s first patient simulator. Norwegian Wikipedia says the Danish sculptor Emma Mathiassen, who had already designed toy dolls for Lærdal, shaped the manikin’s face.

The company then narrowed its range. Norwegian Wikipedia says the publishing business closed in 1975, after 163 picture books and many calendars, postcards, puzzles and colouring books, and that toy production stopped three years later so the company could concentrate on resuscitation training equipment; defibrillators joined the range in the 1980s.

The manikin family grew around the original. English Wikipedia says Resusci Anne itself has been updated in versions with CPR feedback technology, advanced skill training and first aid, and lists Resusci Junior and Resusci Baby for training on children and infants, and the high-fidelity SimMan 3G simulator, introduced in 2009 and followed by variants and by SimMom, SimBaby and SimNewb. In 2019, after a partnership signed in 2018, Laerdal acquired B-Line Medical, a company making debriefing, assessment and training-management software.

Laerdal’s website now groups its work into healthcare education, simulation, resuscitation and medical devices, with product menus covering airway management, immobilisation and CPR feedback devices, and it carries the Limbs and Things and Erler Zimmer names among its product lines. Norwegian Wikipedia says Laerdal received the Hederspris, the honorary award of the Norwegian design body Norsk Form, in 2011.

Design and documentation.

Rescue and emergency medical equipment is bought by people who will use it under pressure, so the makers in this field tend to present themselves through the equipment at work rather than through lifestyle imagery. The typical brochure shows a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance, a crew lifting a patient down a narrow stair, or a basket stretcher being lowered on ropes, with the product carrying most of the colour in the frame.

That colour is often functional before it is decorative. Orange and yellow stretchers, spine boards and evacuation chairs are meant to be seen against grey streets, snow or dark water, and product photographs often make those working colours the focus of the frame, set against equipment in dark navy, graphite or black. The language is technical: load ratings, materials, fastening systems and named product lines rather than adjectives.

Training is the other stage where these brands are seen. CPR manikins laid out in rows in a training room, hydraulic cutters and spreaders opening a scrapped car at a vehicle extrication drill, and ambulances and fire trucks parked with their doors open for inspection all serve as the industry’s own advertising. The photographs are rarely staged far from that reality, because the buyers are paramedics, firefighters and fleet managers who know the work.

Trade fairs give the category its calendar. Interschutz in Hannover, RETTmobil in Fulda and EMS World Expo in the United States are where makers show new stretchers, rescue tools and vehicles side by side, and where a stand’s colours and signage have to read from across a crowded hall. For a designer, the lesson of the category is that a brand earns its look from the job its equipment does: clear colour, clear type and the product shown in use.

A family company in Stavanger.

Laerdal is still a family business. Its website says that “for more than 80 years, the Lærdal family has been committed to the long-term development of the company,” and Norwegian Wikipedia says the founder’s youngest son, Tore Lærdal, took over running the firm in 1981. The headquarters remain in Stavanger; English Wikipedia puts the workforce at more than 2,000 people in 26 countries, while Norwegian Wikipedia gives 1,750 employees in 2021, about 450 of them in Stavanger.

The website describes a group of four parts. Laerdal Medical works in healthcare education and resuscitation training, the website says. Laerdal Global Health is a not-for-profit company, established in 2010 according to English Wikipedia, that develops training for maternal and newborn care in low-income countries. The Laerdal Foundation, set up in 1980 according to English Wikipedia, supports research in acute medicine, and the website says it has supported 1,800 international research projects. The Laerdal Million Lives Fund is described on the website as a venture capital firm investing in emerging technologies. English Wikipedia adds that the foundation hosts an annual meeting of medical researchers at Utstein Abbey, outside Stavanger, and that the company works with partners including the British Heart Foundation, the American Heart Association, for whose school programme it supplies CPR training kits, and the National League for Nursing, on simulation training for nursing education.

For a design guide, Laerdal shows how a company can carry a children’s-book and toy-making past into a technical product line, keeping one name, Anne, across both. Compare Stryker, another medical maker that began with one founder’s workshop, and Spencer Italia, which makes immobilisation and rescue equipment. For this guide we use a fjord teal, a pale mist and an ochre with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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