Matas Brand Guidelines: A 1949 Materialists’ Buying Group, Striped Packs and KICKS

A buying group of independent materialists.

Matas began in Denmark in 1949. The Danish encyclopaedia Lex, in an article last revised in November 2026, explains the trade it came from: the materialister, independent drysalters who since the 1800s had sold chemicals, animal feed, photographic supplies, washing powder, herbs and spices, and who often mixed their own creams, hair tonics and skin tonics behind the counter. In 1949 a group of them joined together to buy goods in common, because buying in bulk earned volume discounts. They named the company MATerialisternes AktieSelskab, “the materialists’ joint-stock company,” and the capitals in that name spell Matas.

The company’s own history page dates the formation to November 1949 and says that by the following year the shareholders counted 60 shops across the country. For most of its life Matas was a voluntary chain rather than a single retailer. Each shop belonged to an independent materialist, and, according to Danish Wikipedia, each shop held one share in Matas A/S, the central company that bought goods, developed products and ran joint campaigns for the members.

The shared identity was built up step by step. The company says it presented its own Matas logo in 1956. Lex dates a collaboration with the Danish firm Steins Laboratorium to 1957, when a common rulebook for all Matas products was written, covering what the packs had to contain and how their contents were labelled. The detail that still identifies the chain arrived in 1967, when the striped packaging was designed; Lex says more than 150 materialists belonged to the company by then, and the company lists skin tonic, toner and moisturising lotion among the earliest striped bottles.

In 1974 Matas added the Vital Shoppen, a health-food corner introduced in answer to a wave of consumer interest in health foods, and Lex counts close to 200 Matas shops by that year. The company says the chain had 292 shops by 2006, the year its shareholders began the change that ended the voluntary-chain model.

Stripes, a club and a 2025 logo.

The stripes are the closest thing Matas has to a visual signature. The own-label range is known in Danish as Matas Striber, or simply “Striberne,” the stripes. Lex says the chain is closely tied in Danish shoppers’ minds to these own products, recognised by the stripes on the packs, and that more than 500 striped products now sit in the range. The company says a new generation of the striped range was launched in 2006.

Matas Group names further own brands alongside the stripes, including Matas Natur, Plaisir skincare, BeautyAct and Nilens Jord make-up. Each carries its own name and pack style, so the striped range remains the one that shares the chain’s name most directly.

The name itself has recently been redrawn. A photo caption in Lex notes that Matas got a new logo in 2025, shown on a shop front in Bagsværd, north of Copenhagen. The encyclopaedia does not describe the new mark in detail, and this guide does not reproduce it.

The loyalty club became part of the brand as well. Club Matas opened in autumn 2010; the company says it had 400,000 members by the turn of that year, and Lex now counts 2.1 million Danish consumers with a membership card or the Matas app. Across the group’s clubs, Lex gives more than six million members.

The shops have kept a local voice. Lex describes individual Matas shops as active on social media, with local staff acting as micro-influencers: head office prepares content, and employees in each shop adapt it for their own followers, so that customers come to know shop staff by their first names. Online, Lex says Matas introduced next-day delivery across Denmark in 2018, with same-day delivery in Copenhagen for orders placed before 3 p.m., and in the same year bought Firtal Group, which ran Helsebixen.dk and other wellbeing web shops. In 2025 it opened a robot warehouse at Lynge, outside Copenhagen, to serve the web shop.

How drugstore chains present themselves.

The guides in this group cover drugstore and pharmacy chains in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Their public face is mostly built from the same parts: a name over the door, a logo on store signs and shopping bags, and own-label beauty and household ranges named as the companies name them. The Austrian chain Bipa, for example, lists own labels such as BI CARE, BI HOME and LOOK BY BIPA on its company page.

Store formats differ more than the signs suggest. Some chains run compact neighbourhood shops; others mix several trades under one roof. German Wikipedia lists the departments of Müller, the Ulm-based chain, as running from drugstore and perfumery to toys, stationery, books and media. Store networks are published by the companies themselves or counted in dated press reports, so every number in these guides carries its year and its source.

Ownership is often less visible than the brand. Many chains sit inside larger retail groups: Bipa has belonged to the German REWE Group since 1996, and REWE International now lists it in Austria, Croatia and Romania. Others are still run by the company of the person who founded them, as German Wikipedia records for Müller. Corporate pages on founders, owners and retail groups are the starting point for these structures, and they are read here alongside encyclopaedias, registers and the trade press.

Identities change too. In January 2026 the Austrian trade site Leadersnet reported a new corporate design for Bipa, developed by BBDO Wien and built around a single capital B. Each guide sets out what can be checked about a chain — its founder, its owner, its network and its look — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From voluntary chain to listed company.

The voluntary-chain model ended in the 2000s. In 2006 the shareholders accepted a takeover offer from investors including the private equity firm CVC Capital Partners, the company says, and on 28 February 2007 Matas moved to a new ownership structure. Most shops joined a chain run as one company, in which CVC held the majority through a holding company called MHolding, while the former owners kept a large minority stake through Materialisternes Invest, Lex says. Shops that stayed privately owned went on working with Matas A/S on the striped range and joint campaigns, according to the company.

Matas listed on the Copenhagen stock exchange on 28 June 2013. Lex names Brightfolk A/S, an investment company, as the holder of the biggest stake in 2025, about 10 percent, followed by the Danish pension fund ATP and Danske Bank. The same article records that in the 2010s Matas faced new competition, as supermarkets built perfume departments and online trade grew, and that in 2013 the discount chain Normal opened, often close to Matas shops. In 2017 Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg became chief executive, and Lex says Mette Uglebjerg, who came from Alimentation Couche-Tard, succeeded him on 1 May 2026.

Abroad, the record is mixed. Lex says Matas opened two shops in Sweden, which closed in 2014 and 2015; News Øresund reported in July 2023 that the chain had left Sweden in 2015. It returned by buying. On 29 June 2023 Matas announced the purchase of KICKS Group from Axel Johnson: the Swedish beauty chain KICKS, founded in 1991 and owned by Axel Johnson since 2002, together with the online skincare clinic Skincity, with 226 shops in Sweden, Norway and Finland, News Øresund reported. Lex, revised in November 2026, says the purchase roughly doubled the group’s shop count.

As of 2025, the group ran 267 Matas shops in Denmark and 230 KICKS shops in Sweden, Norway and Finland, according to Lex; Matas Group’s own website gives approximately 264 Matas stores and names Allerød, north of Copenhagen, as the headquarters.

For a design guide, Matas shows how a buying group of independent shopkeepers can share one name and one striped pack long before it shares one owner. Compare Etos, a Dutch drugstore that grew from a shopkeepers’ cooperative, and Apotek Hjärtat, a Swedish pharmacy chain. For this guide we use an ink blue, a sand and a moss green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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