Mr Bricolage Brand Guidelines: A 1980 Banner for Independent French DIY Stores

Independent shopkeepers who pooled their buying.

Mr.Bricolage — the chain writes its name with a full stop and says it “Monsieur Bricolage” — is a French network of do-it-yourself, garden and home-improvement shops. It was not founded by one retailer. The name was created in 1980 as a shared banner for independent shopkeepers who already belonged to a buying association, the ANPF, the Action nationale des promoteurs du faites-le-vous-même: “faites-le vous-même” is French for do it yourself.

Sources give different dates for that association. Gale’s International Directory of Company Histories, in an entry written after the company’s 2000 stock-market listing, says hardware stores serving the new DIY market began meeting as an informal information exchange in 1964 and formalised it as the cooperative ANPF in 1968. French Wikipedia gives an official founding date of 11 May 1965, with 13 members, and names the retailer Bernard Ivernel, whose shop was near Orléans, as the founder. Both agree on what the ANPF did: it grouped orders so that small independent shops could buy on better terms, while each store kept its own name. Gale lists some of those earlier shop names, among them Kit and Tout Pour le Bricoleur.

By the end of the 1970s, Gale says, large national chains such as Leroy Merlin and Castorama were drawing customers to retail parks on the edge of cities, and the ANPF’s members wanted a name the whole country would recognise. The answer was a single banner with national advertising, while the shopkeepers kept their independence. Gale quotes Maurice Vax, a member who chaired the group from 1978 to 2007 according to French Wikipedia, telling the magazine Capital that furniture retailers had already created Mr. Meuble — “So why not Mr. Bricolage?” French Wikipedia says the banner counted 150 stores by the end of 1980.

From a cooperative to a listed group.

Through the 1980s the ANPF added services for its members. Gale describes a training programme for shop staff and managers, and a second, smaller banner, Bricotruc, launched in 1989 for shops in rural towns of a few thousand people; those stores were moved to the Mr.Bricolage name in the mid-1990s. The banner also went abroad: Gale dates its earliest store outside France to Lisbon in 1990 and a Spanish store in Málaga to 1992, followed by Belgium and Turkey and licences in countries including Uruguay. Shoppers also began to see the name on the shelves: Gale dates the Mr.Bricolage own-label range to 1993 and French Wikipedia to 1994, and Gale says it had grown to about 5,000 products by the end of the decade.

The cooperative structure made it hard to raise outside money. In 1995, Gale says, the group set up a limited company, Mr. Bricolage S.A., as its central buying and distribution business, and in early 2000, the brand’s 20th anniversary, the company was listed in Paris. French Wikipedia dates its head office at La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin, in the Loiret just outside Orléans, to the same year. In 2002 it bought the Tabur group, which brought the Bricogite, B3 and Catena banners, and in 2009 it took over the Le Club group with its Les Briconautes stores, according to French Wikipedia.

A takeover came close in 2014. The trade publication RetailDetail reported in March 2015 that Kingfisher, owner of Castorama and Brico Dépôt in France, had announced nearly a year earlier that it wanted to buy Mr.Bricolage by acquiring the stakes of its two main shareholders, the ANPF and the Tabur family; the French competition authority questioned the deal, and Mr.Bricolage’s board objected to the store sales it would require. French Wikipedia records that the deal was halted in March 2015 and did not go ahead.

Control then moved back to the members. In June 2016 L’Observatoire de la Franchise reported that the ANPF, owned by member-retailers, had agreed to buy most of the Tabur family’s shares. In December 2018 the group decided to sell its own company-run stores, mostly to its members, so that the network would be run entirely by independent retailers, French Wikipedia says; in March 2020 its shares moved to Euronext Growth Paris.

Signs, formats and owners.

European DIY chains and builders’ merchants present themselves first through the building: a large shed on a retail park or industrial estate, with a fascia sign and on-site parking and loading. In the trade press, store openings are reported branch by branch, with the site, the town and the running total, and that branch count is often the main public measure of how a network has grown.

Ownership shapes the identity more than in most retail sectors. Some chains are owned by listed building-materials groups that run several trading names side by side; others are co-operatives or buying groups whose members are independent family firms. In the co-operative model the shared name may sit above the member’s own name rather than replacing it, and store formats are often run as franchises supplied by a central organisation.

Formats are named and graded with care. A group may run a full-size DIY store with a garden centre, a smaller local format, a trade-only warehouse and a merchant yard for builders, each with its own sign but a shared family resemblance. Own-label ranges, hire counters, kitchen design services and click-and-collect services are named by the companies themselves and appear in their store descriptions and opening announcements.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: founders, founding dates, acquisitions and the parent company. The guides in this series set out what dated, independent sources say about each chain — when it began, who owns it and how its network has changed — and keep the companies’ own descriptions clearly marked as theirs.

One name, several levels of membership.

The network today has more than one tier. In April 2025 the business magazine Capital described Mr.Bricolage as a group of independent retailers, and reported that only about a third of its roughly one thousand shops in France carried the Mr.Bricolage name. The rest traded as Les Briconautes or as close to 500 independent affiliates under their own names, mostly in small towns.

To bring more of them under its name, the group marked the banner’s 45th anniversary in 2025 with a second sign, Mr.Bricolage Relais. Capital reported that around forty shops had switched to it since January 2025, from Anould in the Vosges to Aillant-sur-Tholon in the Yonne. Relais shops pay the central organisation less and receive fewer services than full Mr.Bricolage stores, the magazine said; they can also sell things outside DIY, such as building materials or farm supplies, and share a loyalty card with the main banner.

The brand’s wording has changed too. In 2017, French Wikipedia says, the chain replaced its signature line “On peut compter sur lui” — “you can count on him” — with “Faites-le-vous-même mais pas tout seul,” do it yourself, but not on your own. The name itself, in Gale’s account, was borrowed from the pattern of a furniture chain; the “Mr.” is spelled in English but read aloud in French.

For a design guide, Mr.Bricolage shows how a banner can unite shops that remain independently owned, and how one name can be offered at different strengths. Compare Leroy Merlin, one of the national chains the ANPF’s members set out to match, and Castorama, whose owner Kingfisher once tried to buy the group. For this guide we use a tool red and an ink blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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