Media Expert Brand Guidelines: TERG of Złotów, a 2002 Buying Alliance & 618 Electromarkets

Irons, kettles and a garage for a warehouse.

Media Expert’s roots are in Złotów, a small town in north-western Poland, where Teresa Grzebita set up the trading company TERG in the early 1990s; the company’s name is taken from hers, Newsweek Polska reported in January 2015. Marek Grzebita, the company’s chief executive, told the magazine that private garages served as the first warehouses.

The first three shops opened in Złotów, Wałcz and Człuchów, followed by several in Piła. TERG began with small household appliances, such as irons, mixers and kettles, and soon added television and audio equipment, mostly from well-known makers. By the mid-1990s, Marek Grzebita told Newsweek Polska, the company was trading in three provinces.

The Media Expert name came in 2002. According to Newsweek Polska, the network was created that year by several companies and businesspeople from the electronics and appliance trade in different parts of Poland, among them TERG, which joined forces to cut operating and purchasing costs; TERG was then running a dozen or so shops. Polish Wikipedia says the first Media Expert electromarket opened in Złotów, and that TERG has been a joint-stock company since 2012.

The partnership did not stay intact. Newsweek Polska reported that one co-founding firm, Domex, took over the struggling Avans chain in 2012, and that close to 80 Media Expert stores owned by Domex were then re-signed as Avans; Domex later went bankrupt. By early 2015, the magazine reported, the Rzeszów company Astral, with about 70 stores under the Media Expert sign, was the only remaining partner of TERG, which itself owned about 250 of the network’s more than 320 stores. The chain had taken over six Avans electromarkets with the consent of UOKiK, Poland’s competition authority, its spokesman told the magazine.

Small towns first, then the malls.

Media Expert grew mainly in Poland’s small and medium-sized towns, of up to about 200,000 people, which Newsweek Polska described in 2015 as the chain’s target from the start. By then it had also opened stores in shopping centres in Kraków, Poznań and Wrocław, was building up its online shop, which the magazine called the most dynamic part of the market, and was growing through stores it runs itself rather than through franchising, the magazine reported. It also reported that Media Expert had for two years been a member of the buying group Euronics International, the only Polish member at the time. The range, the magazine added, had moved beyond appliances and electronics into goods such as garden equipment and bicycles.

The store count kept rising. English Wikipedia, citing a logistics developer, gives more than 440 stores in 340 towns at the end of November 2017. In November 2022 Wirtualnemedia reported that TERG ran more than 520 stores alongside the Media Expert online platform, and that it also owned the online shops Electro.pl and Avans.pl. At the end of March 2026, according to the group’s annual report as covered by dlahandlu.pl in November 2026, the network had 618 stores, ranging from about 300 to 1,600 square metres, and the TERG group, made up of the parent company and 20 subsidiaries, employed 12,713 people.

TERG has also bought other businesses. In December 2020 it applied to UOKiK to take control of the property company Porea and to buy part of the assets of Norauto Polska, the car-parts and servicing chain; the authority approved the deal, and the company’s spokesman said 26 sites had been bought, the motoring site of Rzeczpospolita reported in March 2021. In November 2022, after a two-phase review that included a market study, UOKiK cleared TERG’s takeover of E Net Production, a Katowice company that builds e-commerce platforms, Wirtualnemedia reported; the authority concluded that the deal would not restrict competition.

The group’s report for the year to March 2026 describes a marketplace launched on Mediaexpert.pl, a mobile app, home delivery and collection of orders in store “within the hour,” according to dlahandlu.pl.

How the region’s retailers present themselves.

Polish and Romanian retailers mostly present themselves through the places where people shop: the fascia above a corner-shop door, the sign on a discount supermarket at the edge of town, the campaign images in a fashion store window, the screens of a marketplace app and the long front of a DIY megastore. Each of these is a design surface the company controls, and the guides in this group read them as the companies publish them, on their own sites, stores and apps.

Store naming in the region is often plain and local. Several chains carry an ordinary Polish word, an animal or a short invented name, and the guides explain what each name means and where it came from, without reading more into it than the sources do. Where a chain changed its sign or colours, the guides give the date of the change and the source that records it.

The corporate pages matter as much as the shopfronts. Many of these businesses were started by founders in the 1990s, later sold to private-equity funds or foreign groups, and in several cases listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. The guides set out founders, owners and listings as dated facts, and they state pending takeovers as pending, with the date they were agreed.

What the guides do not do is rank retailers or judge them as better or worse. Store counts, country counts and formats are given only with the date and source that supplied them, and every palette and typeface shown is our own unofficial interpretation, chosen to describe a look rather than to copy one. No logo, fascia, product or campaign image is reproduced.

Pop singers and low prices.

Media Expert’s advertising has leaned on Polish pop singers. Newsweek Polska reported in January 2015 that the singer Doda had been the face of the chain from a first campaign in 2012, and that she had been followed by the singer Ewelina Lisowska, who sang in the chain’s spots to the tune of her hit “W stronę słońca.” The Lisowska spots of December 2014 were broadcast close to 25,000 times, the magazine reported, and drew a wave of online criticism and parody; they were followed by advertising under the line “Czyszczenie magazynów” (“Clearing the warehouses”). The magazine’s own headline played on the chain’s promise to “switch on low prices.”

In October 2020 the chain changed its approach: the singer Cleo joined as artistic director, responsible not only for appearing in the advertisements but also for their creative side, both musical and visual, NowyMarketing reported; her first campaign, on radio and television, started on 2 November 2020. Polish Wikipedia gives the stylised written form of the name as “mediaexpert,” in lower case.

For a design guide, Media Expert shows how an alliance of small-town shops became a national electromarket brand whose identity rests largely on music-led advertising. Compare Allegro, the Poznań marketplace, and Dedeman, another early-1990s family business that grew into a national chain. For this guide we use an ember red, graphite and steel greys with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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