Plaisio Brand Guidelines: From a 1969 Athens Drawing-Supplies Shop to a Listed Tech Chain

A student, a small shop and drawing supplies.

Plaisio began in 1969 as a shop for drawing supplies, not computers. According to a profile published by To Vima in April 2022, Giorgos Gerardos, then a student at the Polytechnic in Athens, opened a store of about 12 square metres on Stournari Street, next to the School of Civil Engineering, selling drawing and office supplies. The same profile says the idea came to him in Thessaloniki, where he noticed that the materials students used for technical drawing cost much less than in Athens.

The model was about buying. To Vima and the citation for EY’s World Entrepreneur Of The Year class of 2022 both describe the same approach: Plaisio bought directly from manufacturers, cutting out intermediaries, and sold drawing products and scientific equipment to engineering students, architects and related trades at lower prices. EY’s citation calls that model unprecedented in Greece in 1969. To Vima adds that by 1976 the business had grown into a small company with 13 employees.

Computers came in the 1980s. To Vima dates Plaisio’s entry into information technology to 1985 and the assembly of its first Turbo-X computer, built to order, to 1986; EY’s 2022 citation gives 1985 for the creation of Turbo-X as an affordable PC made to customer specifications. Either way, the move gave the company the name it trades under on the Athens exchange, Plaisio Computers S.A., and an own-label range that the 2021 exchange factsheet still lists.

Catalogues, an early web shop and Turbo-X.

Plaisio’s next step was selling at a distance. To Vima reports that the first catalogue sales in the Greek market came with Plaisio’s catalogues in 1995, with items delivered within 24 hours, and EY’s citation dates the company’s contact centre and next-day delivery service to the same year.

1999 brought two changes. Plaisio was listed on the Athens Stock Exchange that year, To Vima reported, and it launched plaisio.gr, which the same report calls the first online store for technology products in Greece able to send an order the next day. The January 2021 company factsheet published by the Athens exchange repeats the claim, describing the site as the first Greek e-shop, established in 1999. The shares trade on the exchange’s Main Market under the symbol PLAIS.

The own label stayed central. The 2021 exchange factsheet says Plaisio specialises in building customised desktop computers under the Turbo-X brand, and that the brand also covers laptops, tablets, mobile phones and PC peripherals. The same factsheet lists the company’s trade as personal computers, telecommunications products and services, consumer electronics and office equipment, sold through shops, the web store and a business-to-business arm. In 2026 Naftemporiki still described the group as active in technology, office supplies and household appliances, the three strands of its history. EY’s 2022 citation describes the chain’s range in similar terms, naming technology products, office supplies, smart-home products and home appliances.

Chains, groups and shop signs.

The consumer-electronics chains of France, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania and Greece sell many of the same televisions, phones, laptops and washing machines, so their identities do much of the work of telling them apart. The shop sign, the logo and the colour scheme are the parts each company controls and publishes itself, on its corporate site, its store fronts and its online shop, and they are the starting point for this series.

Store formats vary from chain to chain. The companies in this series describe formats ranging from large out-of-town stores to smaller shops in city centres and shopping centres, alongside their online shops. Some run every store themselves; others mix directly run stores with affiliated stores owned by independent retailers.

Ownership shapes each brand as well. Some chains are listed companies, some belong to larger retail groups that run several banners, and others are independent retailers joined together in buying associations such as Expert, founded in 1967, whose members trade either under the shared name or under their own banners.

Corporate pages add their own layer: histories of founders and owners, own-label ranges, loyalty schemes and advertising claims, each presented in the company’s own words. In the guides that follow, those claims are attributed to the companies that make them, and the colours and typefaces shown are our own unofficial interpretation rather than any chain’s official specification.

A red disc and a Greek wordmark.

The chain kept growing outside Athens and outside Greece. To Vima reports that the first Plaisio store in Bulgaria opened in 2005, and that in 2008 the company built a semi-automatic distribution centre of 22,500 square metres in Magoula, Attica, where the company is based. In 2019 Plaisio moved into household appliances, according to the same report. In April 2022 To Vima counted 24 stores and service points across Greece and about 1,500 employees.

The most recent figures come from the 2025 results. Naftemporiki reported on 29 June 2026 that the Plaisio group, active in technology, office supplies and household appliances, operated 27 stores after opening a new one in Melissia, in the northern suburbs of Athens, during 2025. It also launched a new e-commerce platform for Plaisio.gr and PlaisioPro.gr, the second aimed at business customers. Euro2day, reporting on the same results on 27 June 2026, said the group includes a wholly owned Bulgarian subsidiary, Plaisio Computers JSC, and had an average of 1,636 employees in 2025. Naftemporiki added that the group had adopted a new call-centre platform for its business sales and had begun moving its enterprise systems to SAP S/4HANA. In 2022 EY named Giorgos Gerardos its Entrepreneur of the Year for Greece for 2021, and placed him in its World Entrepreneur Of The Year class of 2022, with a citation that credits him with making technology affordable and with building the company from a student’s shop into a nationwide chain.

The visual identity is simple. On the January 2021 company factsheet published by the Athens exchange, the mark is a solid red disc beside a lowercase Greek wordmark reading πλαισιο, set in a heavy, rounded type.

For a design guide, Plaisio shows how a retailer can carry a stationery-shop origin into a computer and appliance chain without changing its name or its plain red-and-black register. Compare it with the Athens electricals chain Kotsovolos and with the Polish computer chain Komputronik. For this guide we use a drafting red, an ink black and a tracing-paper grey with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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