Müller Brand Guidelines: A 1953 Hairdresser’s Business Turned Ulm Drugstore Chain

From a salon in 1953 to a drugstore market in Ulm.

Müller is a German chain of drugstores and multi-department shops with its headquarters in Ulm, in Baden-Württemberg. German Wikipedia names the operating company as Müller Handels GmbH & Co. KG and dates its start to 5 March 1953, when the hairdresser Erwin Franz Müller founded his first business; English Wikipedia gives the same date and places the founding in Ulm.

The trade magazine Lebensmittel Praxis, summarising the company’s own account in July 2025, adds detail. According to that account, Müller set up his first salon in his parents’ flat in Unterfahlheim, in Bavaria, and later moved it to Neu-Ulm, across the Danube from Ulm. In 1966 he began offering cosmetics and drugstore goods in the salon, and in 1969 a trip through Canada and the United States gave him the idea of drugstores selling everyday goods and of large self-service stores. In 1973 he opened his first drugstore-only market in Ulm, the magazine reported.

German Wikipedia sets out the early branches a little differently: a branch with a drugstore in Munich in 1968, another in Karlsruhe a year later, and the first pure drugstore market five years after that. In 1976 building began on offices and warehouses in Ulm-Jungingen, together with a vehicle fleet, and between 1980 and 1985 the chain added 59 branches. In 1985 the business became Müller GmbH & Co. KG, and by 1990 it had opened 86 more stores.

That year it opened its first branch in eastern Germany, in Gotha, and in 1991 the first Müller department store, with all of its specialist departments under one roof, opened on Hirschstraße in Ulm, German Wikipedia says.

Drugstore, toys, stationery and media under one name.

The range explains why Müller is more than a drugstore. German Wikipedia lists its departments as drugstore, perfumery, toys, stationery, multimedia, household and home décor, hosiery, a natural-products shop, needlecraft, organic food, books and a photo service, with around 185,000 articles in all; English Wikipedia gives about 188,000. Horizont reported in March 2025 that the Swiss business offered about 190,000 articles, most of them imported from Germany, and English Wikipedia says Müller mostly sells goods sourced from the German domestic market in all the countries where it trades.

Expansion abroad followed German reunification. By June 2019, German Wikipedia says, there were 848 branches: 553 in Germany, 87 in Austria, 83 in Croatia, 56 in Switzerland, 38 in Hungary, 18 in Slovenia and 13 in Spain, all of them on Mallorca. The Swiss network came through the takeover of Estorel AG; in Switzerland the business trades as Müller Handels AG Schweiz, based in Oberentfelden, and in Austria as MHA Müller HandelsgmbH in Vienna.

The group also bought outside the drugstore trade. In 1995 it acquired Budapest’s Café Gerbeaud, together with office space and a large bakery on the edge of the city, and restored the building; in 1997 it took over the toy retailer Obletter; and early in 2017 it bought the Croatian drugstore chain Kozmo from Konzum, according to German Wikipedia.

Lebensmittel Praxis reported in July 2025 that the branch count had risen by a net 35 to 941 in the 2023/24 financial year, with 28 new stores, 22 locations added through an acquisition in Switzerland and 15 closures, and a sales area of about 1.24 million square metres. The same report said Müller had entered Slovakia, founded a national company for the Czech Republic and built a new logistics centre in Spain. English Wikipedia counts 970 outlets in nine European countries by 2025.

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.

A London partnership, a Vaduz holding and a toy shop turned orange.

Müller’s legal structure has moved twice in two decades. In 2004 the company became a Limited & Co. KG registered under English law in London, and from 2004 to 2019 its general partner was Müller Management Ltd, German Wikipedia says. In February 2019 a holding company, MVG Beteiligungs-GmbH, was set up in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, and the British companies of the chain were deactivated; uncertainty over Brexit was given as a significant reason. English Wikipedia likewise says the company has been registered in Vaduz since 2019, while the headquarters remain in Ulm. The founder has stayed at the top: in August 2022, German Wikipedia says, Erwin Müller took over sole management of the chain again, and Lebensmittel Praxis wrote in July 2025 that he was still closely involved in running it.

The clearest recent test of the brand came in Switzerland. On 1 July 2023 Müller Handels AG Schweiz took over Franz Carl Weber, a toy retailer founded in Zurich in 1881, with 21 branches, according to German Wikipedia; Lebensmittel Praxis counted 22 locations. In March 2024 the Swiss broadcaster SRF reported that the toy chain’s main shop on Zurich’s Bahnhofplatz was becoming a Müller branch, with orange posters carrying the Müller logo in the window and the line “Franz Carl Weber wird zu Müller” — Franz Carl Weber becomes Müller. Similar posters had gone up in Zurich-Altstetten, Bern, Basel and Lucerne, SRF said. Horizont reported in March 2025 that only ten shops still traded under the toy chain’s rocking-horse banner, nine had closed and three had reopened as Müller stores, and that Müller ran 89 branches under its own name in Switzerland, where it had traded for about twenty years.

For a design guide, Müller shows a founder’s surname used as the name of a whole multi-department chain, carried from Ulm into other European countries. Compare Rossmann and dm-drogerie markt, two other German drugstore chains. For this guide we use a warm orange, deep ink and shelf white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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