Notebooksbilliger Brand Guidelines: A Sarstedt Web Shop From 2001 and an Orange Tram

A 1989 business that found its name in 2001.

Notebooksbilliger is an online electronics retailer based in Sarstedt, a small town just south of Hanover in Lower Saxony. Its name, roughly “notebooks cheaper” in German, began as a web address, and the company has kept it as its name. Its roots are older than its shop. German Wikipedia says the business was started in 1989 by Arnd von Wedemeyer as a sole trader writing software, and was renamed C&P Network Consulting GmbH in 1996.

In those years it was an IT systems house for business customers rather than a shop. German Wikipedia says it opened a branch in Karlsruhe in 2000 and another in Potsdam in 2003. In between, in 2001, it opened an online shop for notebook computers at the address notebooksbilliger.de. The shop grew into the main business, and in November 2008 the company itself was renamed Notebooksbilliger.de AG, a German public limited company. German Wikipedia gives the short form NBB.

The range widened from notebooks to smartphones, tablets, desktop computers, displays and consumer electronics, German Wikipedia says, and the company also sells to Austria through a separate .at shop. Its head office and central warehouse are in Sarstedt, with further sites listed by German Wikipedia in Laatzen near Hanover, Berlin, Karlsruhe, Munich and Potsdam. Early in 2023 the company announced an expansion abroad, and in mid-May 2023 it began selling in the Netherlands, according to German Wikipedia.

Ownership has stayed close to home. German Wikipedia, citing the company, says C&P Holding GmbH of Sarstedt holds the majority of the shares, while Haubrich Holding SE, the holding company of the Düsseldorf buying group ElectronicPartner, holds more than a quarter. That stake dates from a cooperation announced at the start of October 2012, when ElectronicPartner took a minority holding, German Wikipedia says.

Shops for a web shop.

For its first decade Notebooksbilliger sold only online. Its first shop opened in Munich in March 2010, German Wikipedia says. By the summer of 2013 there were three: ChannelPartner, the German IT-trade magazine, reported in July 2013 that the new Düsseldorf store, in the Flingern district, followed Munich and Sarstedt.

That report gives a clear picture of the format. The Düsseldorf shop had a sales floor of about 400 square metres, ChannelPartner wrote, with a modern but plain interior and a range kept deliberately to the core categories of notebooks, tablets and smartphones. Hundreds of people queued before the doors opened at 11:11 in the morning, drawn by opening offers that the company had promoted on social media, in print and on the radio. The founder and his guests rode to the opening on a special tram, and the magazine noted that the tram, painted in the company colour, orange, would run through Düsseldorf for a year as an advertisement for the store.

More shops followed. German Wikipedia lists Laatzen in 2015, Hamburg in 2016, Stuttgart in 2018 and Dortmund in 2019, and ChannelPartner reported in March 2020 that a store in Berlin, opening that month, would be the company’s seventh. The magazine described the change plainly: a business that had once sold only online was becoming a multichannel retailer.

The company also tried sport as a way to spread its name. German Wikipedia says it set up its own professional cycling team, Team Notebooksbilliger.de, with a junior squad, early in 2006, and announced after the 2007 Tour de France that it would end its cycling activities at the close of that year. A mountain-bike team ran under the name in 2012, and in 2011 the company sponsored a team in the Carrera Panamericana road race in Mexico, with the former racing driver Jochen Mass at the wheel.

Design and documentation.

Consumer-electronics retailers present themselves first through the store. Many trade from large units on the edge of towns, with long aisles divided into product areas such as computing, television, sound, phones and kitchen appliances. Trade reports describe how these floors are laid out for trying things: in 2017 Tweakers described Coolblue’s first XXL store in Amsterdam as six product areas, and in 2026 Républik Retail described a Boulanger store near Lille with a playable gaming area and a seated space for watching projectors.

Delivery is part of the public face. Some chains run their own vans for large appliances and installation, and Coolblue says it added its own bicycle delivery service in cities in 2018. Online shops, click-and-collect counters and services for repair, trade-in, rental and refurbished goods are presented beside the shelves, often under names of their own that sit next to the shop name on signs and websites.

Naming follows a similar pattern. A chain usually keeps one short shop name and adds own-label ranges with separate names, so a single store can carry the retailer’s brand, its house labels and many outside makers side by side. French Wikipedia, for example, dates Boulanger’s Listo and Essentiel B labels to 2005. When a chain buys a rival abroad, it may keep the local name, as Boulanger did with Krëfel in Belgium after 2019.

Behind the shop fronts sit corporate pages. These usually give a founding story, the current owner and any stock-market listing or plan for one, and some owners publish their own announcements of changing stakes. This guide sets out what dated sources say about each company’s founders, owners and listings, and treats the companies’ own descriptions as their claims.

A planned merger, a founder’s exit and a court ruling.

In late September 2018 Notebooksbilliger and Medimax, a chain of electronics stores, announced plans to combine their businesses under a joint holding company. The plan did not last. heise online reported on 23 November 2018 that the two had called off the merger, saying in a joint statement that working out the details had shown the plans would not hold, and that the cultures of an online company and a traditional branch-and-franchise chain were too different.

The founder then stepped back. ChannelPartner reported in March 2020 that Arnd von Wedemeyer had left the management board of the company he founded on 18 February 2020, having handed over the chief executive’s role three years earlier, and that he planned to build a business in Spain.

The company has also faced a data-protection case. In December 2020 the data-protection authority of Lower Saxony fined Notebooksbilliger over video surveillance of employees over at least two years without a legal basis, heise online reported in February 2021; the authority said the cameras had covered workplaces, storage areas and break areas, and some seating in one sales room. The company objected. The regional court in Hannover cut the fine sharply in May 2024, and in a decision dated 18 December 2025 the Higher Regional Court in Celle set the final amount slightly above the regional court’s figure but far below the original, heise online reported in March 2026.

As a brand, Notebooksbilliger is unusual in being named after its own web address. The orange that ChannelPartner called the company colour in 2013 is the one documented design fact; the palette here is our own reading of it.

For a design guide, Notebooksbilliger shows how an online-only name can carry into physical shops. Compare Cyberport, another German web shop that opened stores, and MediaMarkt, the German store chain. For this guide we use an orange and an ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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