A mechanic’s workshop for filing hardware.

Leitz began in 1871 as a small workshop. German Wikipedia describes its founder, Louis Leitz, as a mechanic and a maker of invoice books, and says he set up the business to make metal parts for filing systems — the clips, rings and mechanisms that held papers together. The company dates itself to the same year, listing a mechanical workshop founded by Louis Leitz in 1871 as the first entry in its timeline.

This Leitz should not be confused with Ernst Leitz of Wetzlar, the optical firm behind the Leica camera. The office-products Leitz is a separate Stuttgart business with its own founder and history.

The workshop soon needed a factory. German Wikipedia says the first purpose-built works went up in 1897–98 in Feuerbach, then a separate town and part of Stuttgart since 1933. The complex was extended in several stages between 1898 and 1936, again in the 1960s and again in the 1990s, and the older buildings are now a protected monument. Feuerbach remains the company’s home.

After Louis Leitz’s death in 1918, recorded in the official Deutscher Reichsanzeiger notice that German Wikipedia cites, the business passed to his sons. Ludwig Leitz took the commercial side and Eberhard Leitz the technical side, and the firm continued to trade under the name Louis Leitz as a family partnership for most of the twentieth century.

The file that became a word.

The product Leitz is known for is the lever arch file. On its own website the company says Louis Leitz invented the lever arch file in 1896, and its timeline lists the first Leitz hole punch in 1892 and the first lever arch file in 1896. German Wikipedia’s company article tells the story a little differently: it says a mechanism with a fold-over lever and bow, close to the one used today, came onto the market in 1893, replacing simpler devices in which papers were spiked between two covers. The German Wikipedia article on the file itself credits Friedrich Soennecken of Bonn with the binder and punch of 1886, and says Louis Leitz developed the file into its present form.

Details followed. German Wikipedia says the finger hole in the spine — the round grip that lets a file be pulled from a shelf — was introduced in 1911. According to the same article, “Leitz-Ordner” became a generic German term for any lever arch file, much as a brand name can stand for a whole category. A Leitz No. 18 hole punch is held by the Museum Europäischer Kulturen in Berlin.

Leitz’s own timeline continues with Alpha suspension files in 1952, the first Leitz stapler in 1992 and a mechanism that opens to 180 degrees; Leitz dates that mechanism to 2002, while German Wikipedia, citing the trade magazine Das Büro, dates a 180-degree lever presented by Leitz to 2005. In the 2000s and 2010s the range widened to the WOW series in 2009, Click & Store boxes in 2011, iLAM laminators in 2012, MyBox storage boxes in 2017 and IQ paper shredders in 2018, the company says.

Visual identity has changed with ownership. German Wikipedia says the classic Leitz logo was used until the mid-1990s and was then brought into line with the logo of Esselte after the Swedish group took over. Today Leitz describes its look as distinctive and contemporary, and sells design ranges under names such as WOW, Style and Cosy.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all office-supply names: Leitz, Rexel, Fellowes, Swingline, Esselte, Bostitch and ACCO. Office-supply brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a stationery shop to an office-furniture catalogue.

An office-supply brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single stapler or file than by a name, a colour and the products people recognise on a desk, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factories or grown far beyond the place where it started. 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 identity has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From family firm to ACCO Brands.

The family era ended in 1998, when the Swedish office-products group Esselte bought Leitz, according to both English and German Wikipedia. Esselte itself traces back to 1913, when Swedish printing firms combined in Stockholm as Sveriges Litografiska Tryckerier; it took the name Esselte, from the pronunciation of SLT, in 1970. German Wikipedia says many jobs were cut at Leitz after the takeover. Under Esselte, Leitz sat beside other office brands: English Wikipedia says the Swedish group had bought the label-maker Dymo in 1978, sold it to Newell Rubbermaid in 2005, and in 2010 added the Swedish stapler company Isaberg Rapid and the North American paper-products maker Ampad. In 2002 Esselte itself was bought by the Boston private-equity firm J. W. Childs Associates, English Wikipedia says.

The current owner arrived in two steps. The trade publication PBS Business reported on 24 October 2016 that ACCO Brands was buying the Esselte group, and ACCO announced on 1 February 2017 that it had completed the acquisition, English Wikipedia says, citing ACCO’s release. ACCO Brands, based in Lake Zurich, Illinois, has owned Leitz since 2017. German Wikipedia records that the Stuttgart company changed its name from Esselte Leitz GmbH & Co. KG to LEITZ ACCO Brands GmbH & Co. KG. The same group also owns Rexel and Swingline.

For a design guide, Leitz shows how a single piece of hardware — a lever, a ring and a finger hole — can carry a brand for more than a century. Compare Esselte, the Swedish group that bought Leitz in 1998, and ACCO, its owner since 2017. For this guide we use a file blue, a steel grey and a paper white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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