Svensson Brand Guidelines: The 1887 Kinna Weaver That Turned Curtains Into Greenhouse Screens

A weaver in a rented building.

Svensson is the greenhouse-screen brand of AB Ludvig Svensson, a textile company in Kinna, the main town of Mark municipality in western Sweden. The Norwegian encyclopaedia Store norske leksikon, in an entry updated in January 2026, dates the company to 1887 and names it as the core of Kinna’s long textile tradition; Swedish Wikipedia gives the same year and describes a family company run by the fourth generation of the Ludvigson family.

The company tells its own story this way. In 1887 Ludvig Svensson began weaving textiles in a small rented building in Kinna; steam-powered machines soon followed, and by the early 1900s, it says, the business had become Sweden’s first curtain manufacturer. It passed from Ludvig to his son Ivan and then to the next generation, and the company says it stayed in family hands through economic crises and the world wars.

Kinna lies in the Sjuhärad region, which the company describes as shaped by forests, waterways and generations of textile know-how, from cottage workshops to mills and full-scale factories. In the 1950s and 1960s, it says, it took up new synthetic fibres such as acrylic and polyester and won customers including IKEA and Åhléns, and in 1957 it bought its first warp-knitting machine, which it calls a turning point.

Today the company says it is run by the siblings Anne and Anders Ludvigson, the fourth generation, with Anders Ludvigson as chief executive, and that its commercial ventures sit under the family’s owner company, Ludvigson Invest. Swedish Wikipedia says the company became widely known in the 1982 election campaign, when Prime Minister Olof Palme said that if things went well for Ludvig Svensson, things went well for Sweden; the company quotes the line too and shows a Palme visit to Kinna in 1982.

Curtains for greenhouses.

The greenhouse business grew out of the curtain mill. The company says that during the energy crisis of the 1970s, with leftover curtain material on its hands, someone asked why it should not make curtains for greenhouses. Working with researchers in Alnarp, in southern Sweden, it developed its first climate screen, a knitted cloth, which it says was ready in 1977; a new generation of screens made with aluminium and plastic followed in the early 1980s.

A 2023 Hortidaily feature on the company’s sample library told the same arc: an idea for shading that grew out of a century of curtain-making and the energy crises of the 1970s, early experiments in single greenhouses, and then an order for 10 hectares from a Dutch greenhouse installer. The library keeps rolls from 50 years of development. Each trial, the feature said, means running the knitting machines up to speed and producing a piece of cloth the size of a tennis court, and the current Obscura 9950 screen took 123 test runs.

The Netherlands became its central market. The company says it expanded there in 1981, building relationships with greenhouse builders and growers, and names Cees den Boer and Göran Henningsson as pioneers of that work. Its climate-technology pages now carry screen names such as Harmony, Luxous and Obscura, along with PARperfect, which it presents as a way to manage light around the crop, and ClimaFlow, which it describes as a system for vertical airflow in the greenhouse. It publishes grower stories from Iceland, the Netherlands, Mexico, Colombia and Canada.

In November 2026 Svensson moved into insect netting. On 4 November it announced the acquisition of Holland Gaas, a maker of insect-netting systems based in Maasdijk in the Netherlands, from BOAL Group, and Hortidaily reported the deal the next day. The company said Holland Gaas would keep operating as part of the Svensson Group, with its commercial activities folded into Svensson during 2027, while it would remain a production and innovation company for netting.

Greenhouse builders and horticulture technology.

Greenhouse builders sell something most people never see from the inside: a glass roof that can run for hectares, the steel and aluminium that holds it up, and the heating, cooling, water and climate systems below it. Their pictures tend to repeat a small set of scenes. Long glasshouse roofs catch low evening light; inside, tomato and pepper rows climb toward hanging gutters, shade screens sit half-drawn under the glass, and a climate computer glows on a grower’s desk. The images sell scale and control rather than a single product.

Much of the Dutch side of the trade grew up in and around the Westland, the district south-west of The Hague that Dalsem calls the traditional heart of Dutch horticulture. Certhon gives its headquarters as Poeldijk, in the Westland, and Dalsem gives its address as Den Hoorn, close by. Dalsem traces itself to a blacksmith who started work in the Westland in 1932, and Certhon says it began as a family business in 1896; both have since passed to larger groups, and the guides in this series set out who owns what today and when that changed.

The trade meets at fairs. GreenTech Amsterdam, held at the RAI exhibition centre, said in January 2018 that it would become an annual event, and builders use their stands as showrooms: in June 2022 Certhon said its stand had a large greenhouse deck hanging from the hall’s truss, with a harvesting robot on display beneath it. Trade titles such as Hortidaily report the projects, product launches and changes of ownership that follow.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — when it began, who owns it, where it says it works and what it makes — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word. The palettes and type are our own interpretation, not the companies’ identities.

A better climate for people and plants.

The group has two halves: climate technologies for professional greenhouse growers and interior textiles for public spaces. Swedish Wikipedia lists furniture fabrics, hanging textiles and sun protection on the interior side, and the company says its designers launch seasonal collections at Stockholm Design Week. It says production takes place in its own factories in Sweden, Estonia, the Netherlands and China, that its products reach more than 130 countries, and that it has local teams in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, the USA, Mexico, South Korea and China.

Its group website runs under the line “A better climate for people and plants,” and the climate-technology site under “We can make your climate work.” The brand on the screens is the short form, Svensson, while the company name keeps the founder’s full name and the owning family uses the surname Ludvigson. The website is published in English, Swedish, German, Korean, Dutch, Chinese and Spanish, and the company describes its red-brick factory in Kinna as the place where the business began and where, it says, its heart remains.

For a design guide, Svensson shows how a heritage textile name can carry into technical products without changing its voice. Compare Luiten, a Dutch installer of greenhouse screen systems, and Ridder, another supplier of greenhouse technology. For this guide we use a deep night blue and a warm thread tone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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