Rottne Brand Guidelines: Börje Karlsson’s 1955 Småland Crane & the Blue Forwarders

A farm son, a tractor and a home-made loader.

Rottne takes its name from a small town in Småland, in southern Sweden’s Kronoberg County, and has stayed there for seven decades. Swedish Wikipedia says the company was founded in 1955 by Börje Karlsson, a farmer’s son who began designing and building his own machines on the family farm, mainly for forestry. He founded Börjes Mekaniska Verkstad on the edge of Rottne, where he made a tractor-mounted cable crane known as the Börjekranen, the Börje crane, along with wagons, timber sledges and folding load supports for trucks.

The company tells the origin as a story about loading logs by hand. In the forests of Löpanäs outside Rottne, it says, Karlsson was helping his father haul timber with a tractor that had replaced the family’s horse, and wondered why the tractor stood idling while he struggled to roll logs onto the trailer. The first crane, the company says, was built from a couple of plough parts, a piece of timber, a winch, a length of cable and a pair of timber tongs. Wood Business, publishing the company’s account of its 65th year in April 2020, repeated the same list of parts.

The crane sold well enough, the company says, that the forge on the family farm was soon too small and a new workshop was acquired. Swedish Wikipedia dates a new factory in Rottne’s southern industrial area to 1961, and says that site still housed the head office and much of the manufacturing in 2021. By the end of its first decade, Rottne says, its cranes were going to Denmark and Norway and, more unusually, to Tanzania, through a United Nations body, and to Chile.

Blondin, Rapid and the move into harvesters.

The breakthrough came in 1968. Swedish Wikipedia says the company introduced the Blondin forwarder at the Elmia fair in Jönköping that year, built on a Ford tractor chassis with a ten-tonne load capacity; by 1975 it had built more than 160 of them. The company says the name was a reply to a competitor’s machine called the Brunette, and that owning a “Blond” still has something close to cult status among Swedish operators.

Processors and harvesters followed. In 1976, Swedish Wikipedia says, Rottne introduced the Processor 770, a delimbing and cross-cutting machine that one person could run; the company says the idea came to Karlsson on a family holiday in the mountains. In the early 1980s came a harvester crane with parallel-linkage technology which, with a new felling unit, gave the company its first harvester, the Snoken 810. Rottne also credits Karlsson and its then chief engineer, Risto Hokkanen, with the idea for a geared bogie developed with NAF, which Swedish Wikipedia dates to the Blondin of 1981.

In 1982 the company changed its name from Börjes Mekaniska Verkstad to Rottne Industri, and in 1983 and 1984 it began exporting machines to North America, which Swedish Wikipedia calls one of its largest export markets today. A new machine programme, Rapid, was shown in 1985 and went into series production in 1986; the company says it was built from components rather than being tractor-based, and that it introduced a steerable wagon. To add capacity, Rottne bought a works at Stensele in Lapland in 1988; Swedish Wikipedia names it Sandbergs Mekaniska Verkstad, or SMV, and says it had been declared bankrupt. The company says Stensele now makes all its heads, cab frames and cranes.

The 1990s brought the 2000 and 5000 harvesters, the Solid forwarders and, Swedish Wikipedia says, a move from Ford to John Deere engines across the range. The company says it then developed its H-series harvesters, beginning with the H20, introduced in 2001, and followed by the H8 for thinning and the mid-size H14, and that its Comfort Line cab suspension appeared on the F18 and F10 forwarders in 2007.

Forestry machinery.

Forestry machine makers sell to a small, expert audience: logging contractors, forest companies and the operators who spend long shifts in the cab. Their imagery follows the work. Harvesters and forwarders are photographed in snow, in dense spruce stands and on soft ground, often from low angles that show the crane, the wheels and the load together, and many makers give equal space to the view from the operator’s seat: the cab interior, the controls and the screens of the measuring and control systems.

Paint does much of the branding. Machines are usually finished in a single strong colour, whether yellow, green or red, and makers tend to keep it through mergers and new names. When Komatsu Forest’s machines dropped the Valmet name in 2011, the company said their red would stay, the timber-trade news service Lesprom reported.

Many of these brands are tied to particular towns. In Finland and Sweden the factory and the head office often sit in the same place, sometimes in the community where the business began: Ponsse still builds every machine in Vieremä, in Northern Savonia, and Komatsu Forest has both its headquarters and its manufacturing in Umeå, in northern Sweden, according to the companies. Founding stories, early machines and local workshops feature prominently in their own histories.

The trade meets at working demonstrations rather than in showrooms. Fairs such as FinnMetko in Finland and Elmia Wood in Sweden bring makers, contractors and machines together, and makers time launches and road shows around them: Ponsse says almost 30,000 visitors came to Metko in 2008, and that an international tour in 2007 ended at the Elmia fair in Jönköping. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it and where its machines are made.

Three Swedish factories and a home in Småland.

Rottne Industri remains a Swedish company, run from its head office in Rottne. The company says all of its production is within Sweden’s borders, at factories in Rottne, Lenhovda and Stensele, with about 230 employees, and that almost two-thirds of what it makes is exported to Europe and North America. It describes itself as the fourth-largest maker of wheeled forestry machines for the cut-to-length method, delivering about 200 harvesters and forwarders a year to four continents; those are its own descriptions.

Ownership is private. In June 2021, Forest Machine Magazine quoted Anders Börjesson as Rottne Industri’s majority shareholder, in a report on a plan to give each of the three factories a specialisation. Larger components made at Lenhovda would move to the main factory in Rottne, Lenhovda would concentrate on robot welding, and washing, blasting and painting would all take place at Rottne, while the Stensele factory would carry on as before. Joakim Ragnarsson, the production manager, told the magazine that Rottne was building 150 to 200 machines a year and aiming for 300.

The range today is split into forwarders, harvesters and harvester heads. The company names forwarders including the F10 D, F11 D and F20 D, and harvesters including the H21D of 2014, which succeeded the H20, and the H13F, presented with a new F-cab. Tobias Johansson, the chief executive quoted by Wood Business in 2020, said the company had grown by half in three years and that 2019 had brought record deliveries.

Colour runs through how the brand is described. Wood Business described Rottne’s “blue forwarders and harvesters” in 2020, and the company’s own story leans on Småland, the Börje crane and the Blondin. No official typeface or colour code is published.

For a design guide, Rottne shows how a family workshop’s story, a single machine colour and plain model codes can carry a brand for seventy years. Compare Komatsu Forest, another Swedish maker of harvesters and forwarders, and Eco Log, another Swedish forestry machine maker. For this guide we use a lake blue, a night spruce, frost and a birch gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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