Christiania, 1839.

Schibsted is a surname before it is a company. Norwegian Wikipedia says the business was founded by Christian Schibsted in 1839, when he started a small book-printing firm in the city now called Oslo, then known as Christiania. English Wikipedia gives the name of that firm as Chr. Schibsteds Forlag, the publishing house of Chr. Schibsted. The company’s own history page says 1839 is considered the year in which Schibsted Forlag was formally established, and that Schibsted became sole proprietor of the printing house in 1843.

The newspaper came two decades later. Norwegian Wikipedia says Christian Schibsted launched Christiania Adresseblad in May 1860, and English Wikipedia says the paper was known as Aftenposten from 1885. The new name means “the evening post”, and it has stayed on the masthead since. The company says Christian Schibsted founded the paper and that in 1879 his son Amandus Schibsted took over its management and turned it into a modern newspaper. Norwegian Wikipedia records the same handover in 1879, and adds that in 1885 the paper added a morning edition.

For much of its history the group was a family business with one city paper at its centre. English Wikipedia says Schibsted acquired the tabloid Verdens Gang, known as VG, in 1966, and the company’s history page dates VG’s launch issue to 23 June 1945. Two Oslo mastheads, one a broadsheet and one a tabloid, now sat under the printer’s surname.

The legal form changed in the late twentieth century. English Wikipedia says that in 1989, under the leadership of Tinius Nagell-Erichsen, Schibsted went from a family-owned company to a corporation, and that it was listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange in 1992. The company’s history page says Nagell-Erichsen was board chair at the time of the listing, with Kjell Aamot, previously director of VG, as chief executive. Norwegian Wikipedia says the company became Schibsted ASA at about the same time, and that Aftenposten A/S was set up as a wholly owned subsidiary in 1988.

From mastheads to marketplaces.

In the decades after the listing the surname spread across borders and across kinds of business. The company’s history page records stakes in the Swedish newspapers Aftonbladet, which it dates to 1830, and Svenska Dagbladet. It also records the start of the Norwegian classifieds site FINN.no, originally owned by Aftenposten and other Norwegian papers, and the purchase of the Swedish site Blocket through Aftonbladet. English Wikipedia says that from 1992 to 2006 Schibsted owned part of the Norwegian channel TV 2, and that in 2004 it bought part of TV4 in Sweden, before the company shifted its focus from television towards online classifieds.

By the 2010s, then, the name Schibsted stood above two quite different kinds of brand. On one side were mastheads with long histories, such as Aftenposten, VG, Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet. On the other were websites for buying and selling, such as FINN, Blocket and the French site Leboncoin. Each kept its own name and look; the group name appeared in the corporate layer above them.

An earlier separation came in 2019. English Wikipedia says Schibsted spun off its online marketplaces outside northern Europe into a new company called Adevinta, including brands such as Leboncoin, Kleinanzeigen and Shpock. The trade site OnlineMarketplaces.com, in a report of 13 December 2023, described the same 2019 spin-off of Schibsted’s non-Nordic marketplace businesses to form Adevinta. The new company did not carry the Schibsted name; it received a newly coined one.

The owner behind the name also has its own history. The company’s about page says the Tinius Trust was founded by Tinius Nagell-Erichsen in 1996, and that its purpose is to secure the long-term development of Schibsted and the independence of its editorial teams. Norwegian Wikipedia says the Trust holds its stake through Blommenholm Industrier. That arrangement shaped the next and larger division of the group, in which the surname would end up on one side alone.

Parent names, labels and mastheads.

Group identities in beauty and media work on two levels at once. On the shelf or the newsstand, a reader meets a lipstick, a fragrance, a newspaper or a television channel, each with its own name, typeface and colours. Behind those labels and mastheads sits a parent name that appears in smaller type: on the back of a carton, in the legal line under an advertisement, in the corner of a website footer or on a stock-market listing. The parent identity has a different job. It speaks to investors, employees, regulators and partners rather than to the shopper or the reader, so it tends to be quieter, more typographic and more stable than the brands it carries.

Those parent names also change more often than the labels below them. Groups merge, split into separately listed companies, sell divisions and take new names, and each change brings a new wordmark, a new set of corporate colours and, sometimes, a name chosen to sound neutral across many languages. A house colour can work in both directions: on packaging it can tie a range of products together, while on mastheads it can mark a title as part of a wider family. Reading a group identity well means looking at both layers and at the dates when each one changed.

The name goes with the news.

The split was announced in December 2023. OnlineMarketplaces.com reported on 13 December 2023 that Schibsted planned to sell its news media business to its existing shareholder the Tinius Trust, with titles in Norway and Sweden including VG, Aftenposten, Aftonbladet, Omni and Svenska Dagbladet, while its Nordic marketplaces division remained listed in Oslo. The company’s announcement of 22 March 2024 said a final agreement had been signed, that it would go to shareholders at the annual general meeting on 26 April 2024, and that the remaining listed business would be preliminarily named “Schibsted Marketplaces” while a new company brand was developed.

That brand arrived the following spring. OnlineMarketplaces.com reported on 12 May 2025 that Schibsted Marketplaces had rebranded as Vend, under the new domain Vend.com, as owner of marketplaces including Blocket in Sweden, FINN in Norway, Tori and Oikotie in Finland and DBA and Bilbasen in Denmark. Vend says these marketplace names will not change, but unite under the Vend brand, and that the name reflects the exchanges people make on its sites. English Wikipedia lists the listed company today as Vend Marketplaces ASA, with its headquarters in Oslo.

The surname stayed with the newspapers. Vend says the media operations were sold to the Tinius Trust, already a Schibsted shareholder, and that the media company continues under the Schibsted name. Norwegian Wikipedia says the Trust became sole owner of Schibsted Media in 2024, and that after Schibsted Marketplaces formally changed its name to Vend, Schibsted Media changed its own name to Schibsted in 2025. It lists the group as the parent of VG, Aftenposten, Bergens Tidende, Stavanger Aftenblad, Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet, among others, and English Wikipedia says the media company completed its purchase of the Swedish broadcaster TV4 Media on 1 July 2025.

The result is a reversal of the usual pattern in a split. The listed company, the legal successor of the old group, took a new name, while the part that left the stock exchange kept the founder’s surname. The printer’s name of 1839 now sits above the mastheads it was originally attached to, and the marketplaces carry a coined word of their own.

For a design guide, Schibsted shows how a family surname can follow one half of a divided group, with the mastheads beneath it keeping their own long-established names. Compare Vivendi, the Paris group that split in four in 2024, and Bertelsmann, another family-founded media group. For this guide we use fjord blue, brass and ink with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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