Spliethoff Brand Guidelines: A 1921 Amsterdam Timber Broker and Its Gracht-Named Fleet

A chartering office for Baltic timber.

Spliethoff began in Amsterdam on 11 January 1921, when Johan Fredrik Spliethoff set up Spliethoff’s Bevrachtingskantoor, a chartering office. Dutch Wikipedia, citing newspaper notices of the period, says he had worked in Amsterdam shipping since 1898, chartering timber from the Baltic and the White Sea, and had been a partner in a ship-agency firm from 1913. The new office acted as agent for timber ships from the Baltic and by 1923 sat on the Keizersgracht, one of the city’s main canals. The company’s own history describes the founder as a shipbroker specialising in forest products from the Baltic.

The office stayed a broker, not a shipowner, through its first two decades. During the German occupation, Dutch Wikipedia says, citing the Nederlandsche Staatscourant of December 1941 and a trade notice of January 1942, the shareholders dissolved the limited company on 29 November 1941, and the business carried on as the sole proprietorship of J. Spliethoff, with a branch in Zaandam.

The shipowning business began just after the war. The first vessel the family took into management was a coaster built during the war at the Van Diepen yard in Waterhuizen, whose hull had been seized and put into service for a Lübeck owner; it was traced in Kiel in September 1945, sailed from October 1945 and was renamed Heerengracht in 1946, Dutch Wikipedia says. Under the founder’s son Herman Spliethoff, the chartering office became a shipping company.

Ships named after Amsterdam canals.

The habit that defines Spliethoff’s identity started in June 1946, when its first newbuilding, the Keizersgracht, was delivered. The company says the ship was named after the canal where it had its offices, and that ever since its vessels have carried the names of canals, or grachten, which over the years became the company’s trademark. German Wikipedia makes the same point: the names of Spliethoff ships usually end in “-gracht.” SWZ Maritime, reporting in January 2025, gave the Keizersgracht as a ship of 675 tonnes deadweight.

The early trade was the founder’s trade. Dutch Wikipedia, citing the Algemeen Dagblad of May 1946, says that with this ship Spliethoff’s Suomi line opened a regular service from Rotterdam to southern Finland, and ships for the Finland run were strengthened for ice. The company says its fleet grew from two ships in 1946 to twenty in the 1960s, carrying timber from Baltic ports to northwest Europe and all kinds of cargo on the return legs. In 1958 the office moved to the Houthaven, Amsterdam’s timber harbour.

The 1970s turned a Baltic trader into a worldwide one. The company says it ordered its first series of six ships in Japan in 1975, that more than forty ships have since been built at the same yard, and that from then on it operated worldwide. Dutch Wikipedia names the yard as Miho and says each ship was held in its own limited partnership, in which investors and staff could take a share. By 1986, Dutch Wikipedia says, citing NRC Handelsblad, Spliethoff had 33 ships and was the second-largest Dutch shipowner after Nedlloyd. In 1993 it opened a new head office on the Suezhaven in Amsterdam.

Today Spliethoff itself runs a fleet of more than fifty multipurpose, geared, tweendeck vessels of 12,000 to 23,000 tonnes deadweight, all under the Dutch flag, the company says, under the line “Solid between every shore.” German Wikipedia adds that all its ships carry their own cranes and an ice class.

Design and documentation.

Heavy-lift and project-cargo carriers sell something that is hard to show before it happens: the movement of a single object too large or too heavy for a container. Their websites lean on photographs of their own ships and cargo instead, heavy-lift vessels with paired cranes, decks loaded with modules, port cranes or offshore structures, published by the companies themselves as records of past voyages.

Colour carries much of the identity. Company names are painted large on hulls and crane booms, and across this sector the wordmarks often appear in strong orange, blue or red against white superstructures and dark hulls, so that they read from a quayside or in an aerial photograph. The same few colours then tend to run through the livery, the website and the printed material.

Fleet pages sit at the centre of these sites. Ships are grouped by class and described by crane capacity, deck area and deadweight: Jumbo lists its vessels as K3000, J1800 and H800 classes, and BigLift divides its fleet into heavy-lift types and heavy transport vessels such as the MC-Class. Engineering and transport services, from stowage planning to ship-motion analysis, are presented beside the fleet as a second product.

The rest of a typical site is evidence and reach: project-reference galleries sorted by market, from mining to offshore energy and port development; customer magazines and news of ships on order; and office maps showing sales and agency networks across several continents. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company, its founding, its ownership and its fleet, and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

From one office to seven business units.

From the mid-1990s Spliethoff grew by acquisition. In December 1994 it bought into Mammoet Shipping, the heavy-transport carrier: Dutch Wikipedia, citing de Volkskrant, puts the stake at 51 per cent, while German Wikipedia gives 70 per cent. Mammoet Shipping later became a wholly owned subsidiary and was renamed BigLift Shipping, under that name from 1 January 2001 according to Dutch Wikipedia. Around 2000 the yacht carrier Sevenstar Yacht Transport joined the group; in 2002 Spliethoff took a majority of Transfennica, the Finnish ro-ro operator, and the rest in 2005; the coastal shipping company Wijnne Barends of Delfzijl has been part of the group since 2003; and in 2016 it took over the Finnish ro-ro company Bore, Dutch Wikipedia says.

In 2019 Spliethoff also bought ships from the insolvent Hansa Heavy Lift. Baird Maritime reported in April 2019 that five former HHL ships had been renamed Pietersgracht, Pijlgracht, Poolgracht, Pauwgracht and Paleisgracht, and that they were the sixth to tenth vessels the group had bought from HHL that year: the canal names went on the hulls straight away.

The latest addition is ForestWave of Groningen. SWZ Maritime reported in September 2024 that ForestWave would join as the group’s seventh business unit on 30 September, with Spliethoff as majority shareholder, while keeping its own brand name, identity and operational independence; the combined fleet would reach 147 vessels. The company now says the group operates around 145 vessels. Spliethoff marked its hundredth year on 11 January 2021, and in January 2025 SWZ Maritime described the group’s chief executive, Huib van de Grijspaarde, as a great-grandson of the founder.

For a design guide, Spliethoff shows how a naming rule can carry an identity for eighty years: one canal after another painted on the bow, with a group of separate brands kept alongside. Compare BigLift, its heavy-lift sister, and Hansa Heavy Lift, whose ships it renamed. For this guide we use canal blue, timber brown and quay stone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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