Edsken in 1857, Sandviken in 1862.

Sandvik began with a steelmaking licence. English Wikipedia says the company was founded by Göran Fredrik Göransson, an early user of the Bessemer process, who acquired rights to the patented method in 1857 and applied it in a blast furnace at Edsken, in what is now Hofors Municipality. The European Route of Industrial Heritage, in its biography of Göransson, says he demonstrated the successful application of the Bessemer converter in July 1858 and introduced improvements to the flow of blast air through the tuyeres, which Henry Bessemer took up.

Edsken was too small for the scale Göransson needed. English Wikipedia says this led him in 1862 to found a new company, Högbo Stål & Jernverks AB, in a place that developed into the town of Sandviken, in Gävleborg County. The heritage route’s biography adds that in the same year he demonstrated the Bessemer process at the London international exhibition, and that the new works stood in an uninhabited area close to supplies of iron ore. To attract a workforce, it says, he built a village with gardens, free firewood and free medicine, and set up a charitable foundation to care for the sick and elderly and to give grants to students.

The company soon took the name of its place. English Wikipedia says that in 1868 it was reorganised as Sandvikens Jernverks AB, the Sandviken Ironworks, and that it was already exporting in the 1860s, with the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Russia among its markets. The encyclopedia dates the company’s use of the Sandvik brand name to the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, with sales to the United States beginning the following year. The short form of the town name became the word stamped on the product long before it became the name of the company.

The ironworks moved steadily into tubes and special steels. English Wikipedia records that in 1889 the company began making seamless rolled tubes and invested in production for them over the following decade, that Sandvikens Jernverk was listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange in 1901, and that hollow rock drill steels went into production in 1907. Sales subsidiaries outside Sweden followed, beginning in Birmingham in 1914 and continuing in the United States in 1919, France in 1923 and Canada in 1926. In the 1920s the company began melting stainless steel, and in 1924 it began producing stainless seamless tubes.

Coromant, Sandvik AB and a spin-off called Alleima.

A second brand name arrived with cemented carbide. English Wikipedia says that in 1942 the company reached an agreement with Lumalampan, a subsidiary of the Swedish cooperative Kooperativa Förbundet that made tungsten light bulbs and carbide tools for drawing filament wire, and that in the same year the Sandvik Coromant brand was registered for cemented carbide products. Metal cutting tools followed from 1943. Bessemer steel production, the process the company had been founded on, ended in Sandviken in 1947; in the same year, according to the encyclopedia, the company became the exclusive supplier of cemented carbide rock drill steels to Atlas Diesel, later known as Atlas Copco. Carbide production then spread to new sites, including Gimo from 1951 and the Västberga district of Stockholm from 1953.

The company name caught up with the brand in 1972, when English Wikipedia says Sandvikens Jernverk became Sandvik AB. The town name and the word “ironworks” dropped away, leaving the single word that had been used on products since the 1870s. Later acquisitions kept their own names under it: the encyclopedia lists a majority of the Swedish resistance-materials company Kanthal and the remaining shares of the Finnish mining equipment maker Tamrock in 1997, and a majority position in the German cutting tool maker Walter AG in 2002. In 1999, it says, Sandvik sold its production of saws and other craft tools.

In 2022 the steel side of the business took a new name of its own. English Wikipedia says that in August 2022 the business area Sandvik Materials Technology, which included tubes, strip steel, medical wires and Kanthal heating products, was spun off as a separate company listed on Nasdaq Stockholm, with its shares distributed to Sandvik’s shareholders, and that the new company was named Alleima. Mondo Visione carried Nasdaq’s announcement on 31 August 2022 that trading in Alleima AB’s shares, under the short name ALLEI, had begun that day on the Nasdaq Stockholm Main Market, describing the company as a spin-off of Sandvik’s Materials Technology division. Alleima’s president and chief executive, Göran Björkman, called the listing an important step for the company’s future.

The spin-off separated the name from the steel it began with. The tubes, strip and special alloys that grew out of the Sandviken ironworks now trade as Alleima, while Sandvik AB is organised, English Wikipedia says, into three business areas: Mining and rock solutions, Rock processing solutions and Manufacturing and machining solutions. The Sandvik Coromant name registered in 1942 remains part of the group.

Industrial group names and their marks.

European industrial identities tend to be built from plain materials. Many company names began as a founder’s surname, the name of a town or river, or an acronym left behind when two firms merged and kept a trace of each. Those names were rarely chosen for sound or meaning; they were registered, painted on a works gate and stamped into metal, and they stayed because changing them would have meant changing every plate, invoice and drawing at once.

That history shapes how the marks look today. A wordmark that has to be cast into a pump housing, etched onto a switch plate or printed on a shipping crate needs simple letterforms, generous spacing and a single colour that survives grime, paint and sunlight. Symbols are often abstract shapes or stylised initials rather than pictures, because they must read at the size of a thumbnail on a control panel and at the size of a building on a factory roof.

The brand surfaces are mostly physical: product plates, machine liveries, signage at plant gates, vehicle fleets, trade-fair stands and the technical manuals that travel with the equipment. Reviewing one of these identities means looking at where the mark is actually fixed, not only at the version on a screen.

September 2023: a new logotype and a new symbol.

The current look dates from autumn 2023. Southeast Asia Construction reported on 26 September 2023 that Sandvik had introduced a new logo and visual identity. According to the report, the logo is inspired by the 1962 Sandvik logo and is intended as a tribute to the company’s heritage and history, and a new symbol was introduced as the key bearer of the Sandvik brand and the mark of the corporate purpose. The company said the symbol represents “progress” and “circularity”. English Wikipedia also records that in September 2023 Sandvik adopted a revised visual identity with a new logotype containing different graphical elements from the previous one.

Sandvik framed the identity in terms of its recent changes. The same report says the company described the updated identity as resting on three core elements, proactive partnerships, forward-thinking solutions and sustainable progress, and linked it to a purpose stated as “advancing the world through engineering”. Sandvik cited strategic acquisitions and the 2022 listing of the business area Sandvik Materials Technology, the business now called Alleima, as changes that had reshaped the company. The president and chief executive, Stefan Widing, was quoted as saying he was pleased to reveal a new, modern brand identity and logotype fit for the company’s purpose and strategy.

The 2023 identity looks backwards and forwards at once. The wordmark draws on a logo from the year 1962, a decade before the company formally took the single word Sandvik as its name, while the new symbol carries the corporate purpose. The name underneath has stayed close to its place of origin: a town called Sandviken, an ironworks called Sandvikens Jernverk, a brand called Sandvik from the 1870s, a carbide brand called Sandvik Coromant from 1942, and since 2022 a separately named steel company, Alleima, carrying the tube and strip business that began in the same works.

For a design guide, Sandvik shows how a town name can be cut down to one word on a product, adopted as the company name a century later, and redrawn in 2023 by returning to a logo from 1962. Compare Atlas Copco, the Stockholm company that bought Sandvik’s carbide rock drill steels from 1947 and introduced its own Group logo in 2023, and Alfa Laval, another Swedish engineering name. For this guide we use Bessemer ember, Sandviken steel and pale ash with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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