A family firm in Emsland that began with staplers.

Novus is a stapler brand from Lingen (Ems), a town in the Emsland district of Lower Saxony, close to the Dutch border. It belongs to a family company whose own history begins with its founder. The emco Group says the business was founded in 1945 by Erwin Müller, and that its first employee was his wife, Ursula Müller. The parent company still carries his name: German Wikipedia identifies the Erwin Müller GmbH in Lingen as the top company of the group.

Staplers came first. The group’s own timeline dates the start of Novus stapler production to 1949, and its description of the office business calls Novus the group’s original division. German Wikipedia gives the same sequence: after the 1945 founding, the production of staplers began in 1949. The company’s history page also singles out an early desk stapler, the Primus, among the models of those first years.

The family business then spread well beyond the office. According to the emco timeline, emco bathroom accessories went into production in 1952, roll-up and swimming-pool gratings followed in 1960, and the group entered air-conditioning in 1972. German Wikipedia today describes the group as a maker of building technology, fastening technology and office technology, which is why a bathroom-mirror cabinet and a desktop stapler can carry addresses in the same Lingen street. A photograph on Wikimedia Commons shows a box of Novus staples from around 1980, labelled as made by the then Erwin Müller Gruppe in Lingen, West Germany.

The second generation took the lead in the 1970s. The company says Harald Müller joined in 1968 and took over responsibility for the group’s management in 1977.

From desk staplers to staple guns and monitor arms.

Under the Novus name the group sells more than the classic office stapler. On its page for the “worklife” business, emco lists three Novus lines. Novus Office covers staplers and the wider desk range; German Wikipedia adds staples and hole punches to the list of office products made under the brand. Novus Tools supplies universal staple guns and hand riveters for building sites and workshops, and German Wikipedia names manual, electric, cordless and compressed-air tackers among them. Novus More Space is a system of workplace equipment; German Wikipedia lists monitor arms, filing systems, desk lamps and display-panel holders as part of the multi-workstation range.

A second brand arrived in 2002, when the group took over Dahle Bürotechnik, according to both the company timeline and German Wikipedia. Dahle brought paper-cutting machines — lever, rotary and stack cutters — together with document shredders and presentation products such as flipcharts, German Wikipedia says; the emco page adds pencil sharpeners to the Dahle Office range. In 2012 the company records the merger that created Novus Dahle GmbH & Co. KG, and in 2018 a renaming of the group companies that left the office business trading as Novus Dahle.

Manufacturing is spread across several countries. The company timeline dates the start of production in France and the Czech Republic to 1994; German Wikipedia names production sites in the Czech Republic, France and China alongside the headquarters in Lingen. emco records that it formed emco Novus International in Hong Kong in 2009, expanded its sites at Dampierre in France and Chuzhou in China in 2013, and opened a third plant in China in 2015. A research and development centre opened at the Werk I plant in Lingen in 2012, the company says.

For the brand itself, emco’s description of Novus Office stresses a modern design and practical details intended to make everyday office work lighter.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all office and school supply names: Novus, Herlitz, Durable, Kangaro, Maped, Jalema and Elba. Office and school supply brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger stationery groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a school shop to an office catalogue.

An office supply brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single stapler or folder than by a name, a colour and the packaging around it, because the company behind the name may have merged, changed hands or moved its production. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Still a family group in Lingen.

The group took its present name in 2014. The company timeline says the Erwin Müller Group Lingen became the emco Group that year, and German Wikipedia records the renaming in March 2014. The emco site describes the group as a family-run international holding company that unites several brands under one roof, organised into two business areas: “architecture”, with the emco bath and emco bau brands, and “worklife”, with Novus and Dahle.

Leadership passed outside the founding name in the 2010s. The company says Christian Gnaß joined the management board of the Erwin Müller Group in 2008 and took over as chair of the management board in 2015; German Wikipedia describes him as the managing partner who has led the family business since then. Daniel Sarbandi joined the board in 2017, and the company’s timeline records that Stephan Hettwer became chief executive in 2026.

The group has kept growing around its office brands. emco lists a majority shareholding in the cleaning-mat specialist C/R/O in 2007 and a full takeover in 2010, the founding of Shenzhen Novus Dahle Culture Products in China in 2018, a further production company at Chuzhou in 2019 and a new building there in 2021.

For a design guide, Novus shows how a single tool category can anchor a family company for decades while the group around it widens into bathrooms, entrance matting and workplace furniture. Compare Rexel, the London stapler maker, and Swingline, the American stapler brand. For this guide we use a stapler blue, a brushed steel and a desk white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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