A maker of precision drawing instruments.

Maped’s name describes what it first made. English Wikipedia explains it as an acronym of “manufacture d’articles de précision et de dessin” — a maker of precision and drawing articles — and dates the company to 1947. On where it began, the two Wikipedias differ: English Wikipedia says Maped was founded in Annecy, in Haute-Savoie, while French Wikipedia says it started in the Arve valley, a metalworking area of the same department, before settling in Annecy.

The first products were brass compasses, English Wikipedia says, and until 1985 the compass remained the company’s only production activity. For almost four decades Maped specialised in geometry sets for drawing offices, designers and architects. In 1980 it joined a grouping of stationery manufacturers set up to pool distribution, a link that ended when that group was dissolved in the late 1990s, after which Maped sold independently in France.

The year 1985 was the turning point. English Wikipedia records the arrival of Maped’s first new range, scissors, and in the same year Jacques Lacroix took over the family company. French Wikipedia describes the scissors as Maped’s entry into the mass market for school accessories.

Erasers followed. In 1992 Maped acquired Mallat, a French eraser maker whose range included the pink-and-blue Duo eraser, and began making erasing and marking products, English Wikipedia says. French Wikipedia places the same purchase at the start of a wider move into erasers, drawing instruments and office accessories during the 1990s.

From compasses to a full school range.

Through the 1990s and 2000s Maped added a product family almost every few years. English Wikipedia lists the sequence: in 1993 a production site and subsidiary in China, alongside a move into office supplies such as hole punches and staplers; pencil sharpeners on sale from 1996 and school accessories from 1997; a subsidiary in Argentina and an entry into creative leisure in 1999; and a factory acquired in Mexico in 2002. Maped’s first television advertising in France ran in 2003, the same year it began making pencil sharpeners itself.

Writing and colouring came next. English Wikipedia says Maped began manufacturing coloured pencils in 2005, launched felt-tip pens soon after, and in 2008 introduced a school writing range that included the Twin Tip 4, a four-colour ballpoint. A new factory in China, begun after that, became operational in 2010, the article says. The range kept widening at the edges too: a specialist storage range in 2004 and shears and cutting machines from 2007.

The sales network grew in step. English Wikipedia lists affiliates in Canada and the United States from 2005, a subsidiary in Greece in 2006, one in Turkey in 2008, affiliates in Romania, the Netherlands and Britain in 2010, offices in India and Peru in 2011 and a subsidiary in Russia in 2012. A subsidiary in Brazil had opened in 2003.

Acquisitions widened the group abroad. In 2006 Maped bought the German office-supplies group Helit, with its Diplomat writing range, and the French storage maker JFP Graphos, which was merged in 2007. In 2012 it acquired Helix, an English family-run maker of school accessories, which became Maped Helix. On 21 March 2016 Maped bought the French plastic-model and toy maker Heller Joustra, English Wikipedia says, and announced that it was taking over the Joustra factory.

French Wikipedia says a significant part of production is carried out in-house, at industrial sites in France, China and Mexico, and that beyond school and office supplies the group also makes creative-leisure products and reusable food containers. English Wikipedia lists Maped Picnik, Maped Creativ and Color’Peps among the names it trades under.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all office and school supply names: Novus, Herlitz, Durable, Kangaro, Maped, Jalema and Elba. Office and school supply brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger stationery groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a school shop to an office catalogue.

An office supply brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single stapler or folder than by a name, a colour and the packaging around it, because the company behind the name may have merged, changed hands or moved its production. 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 marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family company that also owns toys.

Maped has stayed in one family. French Wikipedia describes it as a family company run by the Lacroix family, with its head office at Argonay, next to Annecy. English Wikipedia says that in 2017 Jacques-Antoine Lacroix succeeded his father as chief executive; reporting the Juratoys deal in October 2022, the trade magazine Nursery Today quoted Maped’s chief executive as Romain Lacroix. English Wikipedia also records that at the start of 2021 Maped reworked its brand image with a new visual identity; the article also notes a new corporate identity in 2004.

The toy side grew in 2022. French Wikipedia says Maped announced the acquisition of the Juratoys group that year, bringing in the brands Janod, Kaloo and Lilliputiens; Nursery Today reported the deal on 21 October 2022, adding that the Juratoys site at Orgelet in the Jura would remain the group’s centre for games and toys while the school-supplies business continued to be run from Argonay. English Wikipedia lists Maped Office, Joustra, Helit and Helix among the group’s brands alongside Maped itself. With Joustra already in the group, Maped’s portfolio now runs from compasses and erasers to wooden toys and plush.

For a design guide, Maped shows how a maker of drawing instruments can carry one name from the drafting office into the school bag and the toy box. Compare Janod, the Jura wooden-toy brand Maped has owned since 2022, and Herlitz, the Berlin school and office stationery brand. For this guide we use a geometry blue, a pencil yellow and an eraser coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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