An émigré salesman starts his own business.

Rexel is a British brand. On its brand website, which ACCO Brands now runs, Rexel says it was founded in London in 1939 by George Drexler. The company’s account says Drexler was born near Prague, moved to Hamburg in the early 1930s to work for a German office-supply business, and was sent by that firm to London in 1935 to open a branch in England. In 1939 he set up on his own, and the brand site calls that the start of the Ofrex Group of companies.

This Rexel is unrelated to Rexel SA, the French electrical-equipment distributor of the same name.

Two names ran side by side. According to the Rexel account, Rexel sold the group’s products to retailers while Ofrex sold to end users. Grace’s Guide, the British industrial-history archive, lists Rexel as an exhibitor at the 1947 British Industries Fair at Olympia, based on Newman Street in London and making stapling machines and staples, carbon papers, typewriter ribbons, Speedfix and Vis-rex adhesive tapes, Rexel automatic pencils, numbering and dating machines and edge binders. Grace’s Guide describes Rexel as the principal subsidiary of Ofrex by 1980. Its entry for Ofrex, based in Stephen Street in London, quotes a 1961 business directory describing the company as a maker, distributor and exporter of patented office and drawing-office supplies, office machines, stapling machines and staples, carbons, ribbons and stencils.

Ofrex grew into a listed company. The Rexel account says the group went public in the 1960s. Grace’s Guide, citing The Times of 7 November 1980, records that Ofrex bought Cumberland Graphics and Cumberland Pencils that year, including a factory in Keswick, with the products to be marketed by Rexel.

The 56 Range and the Little Man.

Rexel’s timeline begins its product story with the Crystalfile suspension file of 1945. The brand’s signature, though, is stapling. The company dates the launch of its 56 Range of staplers to 1956. Its timeline also marks a production milestone for the Matador stapler in 1998.

Rexel says it introduced the “Little Man” logo in 1958 and describes it as its early symbol of quality around the world. The company does not publish the designer of the mark, and no official colour values for it are published either, so the red, chrome and charcoal on this page are our own interpretation rather than a brand specification.

Filing and shredding widened the range. The Rexel timeline lists the Nyrex folders and filing products in 1960. In 1968, the company says, it began making Ofrex and Fordigraph shredders — later branded Rexel — at Droitwich in Worcestershire. Shredders remain in the range: Rexel dates its Mercury jam-free shredders to 2007, its first Auto Feed shredders to 2010 and its Momentum range to 2019, the year it marked eighty years since its founding.

The brand site itself is an exercise in heritage. It sets out the story in two parts, “Rexel Then” and “Rexel Now,” and the “Now” section, written for the brand’s eightieth year in 2019, says Rexel products were sold across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. That year Rexel launched the Momentum shredders, which the company presented as its most recent innovation.

Desk accessories are a recent addition. Rexel says it launched the Choices range of co-ordinated desk accessories in 2018.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all office-supply names: Leitz, Rexel, Fellowes, Swingline, Esselte, Bostitch and ACCO. Office-supply brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a stationery shop to an office-furniture catalogue.

An office-supply brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single stapler or file than by a name, a colour and the products people recognise on a desk, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factories or grown far beyond the place where it started. 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 identity has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Ofrex to ACCO.

In the early 1990s the Rexel business became part of the British arm of the American office-products group ACCO. Companies House records show the sequence. ACCO’s British company, incorporated in 1924 as Acco Company Limited and renamed Acco Europe Limited in 1989, became ACCO-Rexel Limited on 1 December 1992 and ACCO UK Limited in December 1995. The Ofrex parent company, Ofrex Group International Limited, was renamed ACCO-Rexel Group International Limited in November 1992. The old Ofrex engineering company, set up in 1951, took the name Rexel Engineering Limited in 1982 and Rexel Limited in 2002 before being dissolved in 2011.

ACCO has owned Rexel since 1992. Its parent changed shape in 2005, when Fortune Brands spun off ACCO World and merged it with General Binding Corporation to form ACCO Brands Corporation, according to English Wikipedia. ACCO Brands is based in Lake Zurich, Illinois, and traces its name to the American Clip Company founded in 1903. In 2012, English Wikipedia says, ACCO Brands merged with the consumer and office products business of MeadWestvaco, adding American school and diary brands such as Mead, Five Star and AT-A-GLANCE. It then bought the Swedish group Esselte, completing that deal on 1 February 2017; English Wikipedia lists Leitz, Rapid, Oxford, Pendaflex and Xyron among the Esselte brands, which brought the German file maker Leitz and the Swedish stapler brand Rapid into the same group as Rexel. The British business, ACCO UK, is registered in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire.

For a design guide, Rexel shows how a stapler range and a small figurative mark can carry a British office brand through several owners. Compare Swingline, ACCO’s American stapler brand, and Leitz, the German file maker in the same group. For this guide we use a stapler red, a chrome grey and a charcoal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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