Tyreplus Brand Guidelines: The Michelin-Created Tyre-Dealer Franchise Founded in 2002

A franchise for independent tyre shops.

Tyreplus is a franchise network of tyre retailers that, in Michelin’s own words on its Middle East website, was “created and certified by Michelin.” Michelin gives 2002 as the year it was established, and independent reports agree: the New Zealand trade paper Motor Equipment News gave the same year in September 2011, as did a Tire Business report carried by the European Rubber Journal in November 2012.

The shops are not Michelin branches. The network’s international website describes Tyreplus as a network of professional independent tyre retailers, and its recruitment pages invite dealers to join a national network while “retaining your independence.” Motor Equipment News also called it an independent network of tyre retail stores; the first New Zealand stores it reported in 2011 were locally owned, and the first Philippine store reported in 2018 was run by a local company.

Its early spread was mostly outside western Europe. In September 2011 Motor Equipment News reported that Tyreplus was present in Australia, China, Thailand and Russia, as well as India, Taiwan and Mexico, and that it had just arrived in New Zealand with two stores in Hamilton. Those stores sold Michelin and BFGoodrich tyres with repairs, wheel balancing and wheel alignment, and, in what the paper called a first for the brand, worked with the suspension specialist Pedders Suspension; Michelin’s New Zealand distributor, Tyreline Distributors, supported the launch.

A year later the network was much larger. In November 2012 the European Rubber Journal, reporting a Michelin investor day at its research centre in Ladoux, said the TyrePlus concept had grown to 1,385 locations in more than a dozen countries on five continents, active in eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and Latin and South America, while Michelin’s Euromaster covered western Europe.

Tyres plus the service bay.

The name describes the offer: tyres, plus the jobs around them. The international website calls each shop a one-stop shop with a wide choice of major tyre brands, lubricants, batteries, and suspension and brake systems, and sets out three “points of difference”: an inviting experience, with a comfortable waiting area; transparent service; and what it calls comprehensive care, anticipating problems rather than reacting to them.

The 2012 investor-day report gave a sense of Michelin’s ambitions for the format. The European Rubber Journal said Michelin then planned to more than double its franchised retail presence, Euromaster and TyrePlus together, to more than 5,000 stores by 2017, with growth targeted in China, the ASEAN countries, Mexico, South America, eastern Europe, Africa, India and the Middle East, and about 60 stores in Australia. Those were targets at the time, not reported results. The same report gave the starting points behind them: about 840 stores in China, 219 in the ASEAN countries, 173 in eastern Europe, about 100 across Africa, India and the Middle East, 50 in Mexico and three in South America.

Openings since then show how the network enters a country. In the Gulf, Michelin said in a January 2015 press release that it had opened its 100th Tyreplus branch in the GCC countries, in the Madhab area of Fujairah, the 20th in the United Arab Emirates. Michelin’s Middle East website now describes Tyreplus there as a network of more than 80 Michelin-authorised multi-brand tyre dealers in the GCC.

In the Philippines, CarGuide.PH reported in February 2018 that Michelin Philippines had opened the country’s first Tyreplus in Parañaque, Metro Manila, run by a local operator. It described a one-stop shop for tyre fitting, wheel balancing and alignment, oil changes and brake servicing, carrying Michelin and BFGoodrich tyres alongside other brands of lubricants, batteries and brake parts, and said the network then had more than 2,000 centres in 17 countries.

Signs, menus and owners.

Car-service, tyre and auto-parts chains sell things that are hard to picture: a tyre change, an oil service, a set of wiper blades. So their identities lean on the shop front. A sign has to be read from a moving car, across a forecourt or a retail park, and most of these chains rely on one strong colour, a short wordmark and a fascia that looks the same from town to town. Some explain the choice: Autobacs links its orange to its founder’s visit to the United States, according to a 2014 profile in Hiragana Times.

The formats vary more than the signs. Some chains run drive-in service centres with a row of bays and a small counter; others run large stores where accessories, tyres and car-care goods fill the floor and a workshop sits alongside. In Japan, Autobacs lists a large-format Super Autobacs, a format combined with a fuel station and car-wash shops next to its standard store, and Yellow Hat counts motorcycle and bicycle chains among its group companies.

Ownership shapes the brand as well. Many networks are franchises, with local owners trading under a shared name; Autobacs says it began franchising in 1975, and Yellow Hat signed its first group store in 1982. Other chains belong to tyre makers or parts groups. The guides in this series name those owners and give the dates of each change, from company pages and dated reports, without ranking one chain against another.

Service menus are where the design work becomes practical. Chains name their services the way a driver would ask for them, and Yellow Hat’s service pages, for instance, cover tyres, air-conditioning maintenance and bodywork repair. Most also publish corporate pages on founders, owners and store counts. Read together, those pages show how a sign, a colour and a list of services turn into a brand.

One name, many local operators.

The spelling of the name varies by source. The network’s own websites set it in capitals, TYREPLUS, while trade titles have written Tyreplus, TyrePlus and Tyre Plus; this guide follows the single-word form. Each country has its own site, from Australia, Malaysia and Thailand to a shared Middle East site covering the Gulf states, and the international site links them together under the line “Your car, our care.”

The size of the network depends on who is counting and when. Michelin’s Middle East website says Tyreplus serves drivers in 26 countries. The international website, in November 2026, lists 15: Cambodia, mainland China, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand in Asia; Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East; and Australia. Several countries named in the 2011 and 2012 reports, among them Russia, India, Mexico and New Zealand, do not appear on that list.

For a design guide, Tyreplus shows how a tyre maker can lend one name and one shop format to independent dealers across very different markets. Compare Michelin, the company that created the network, and Euromaster, Michelin’s network in western Europe. For this guide we use graphite, coral and a warm paper with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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