Wilko Brand Guidelines: A 1930 Leicester Hardware Shop, a 2023 Collapse & The Range

A hardware shop in Leicester, run by one family.

Wilko began as Wilkinson, a hardware shop opened in Leicester in 1930 by James Kemsey Wilkinson and Mary Cooper, English Wikipedia says. A second store followed in Wigston Magna, near Leicester, in 1932, and there were nine branches by 1939. Retail Gazette, reporting the chain’s collapse on 10 August 2023, likewise traced it to Leicester in the 1930s and said it had grown to about 400 stores.

The business stayed with the founding family for its whole independent life. English Wikipedia says the founder’s son, Tony Wilkinson, joined as a branch manager in 1960 and became chairman in 1972, overseeing a long expansion: the chain had 78 stores by the end of the 1980s and more than 150 by the end of the 1990s. In June 2005 his daughter Lisa Wilkinson and his niece Karin Swann took over, and the shops moved from hardware towards general variety retail. Wilkinson opened its first Scottish store, in Castle Douglas, in January 2009, the same source says.

An own-label nickname over the door.

The name Wilko came from the shelves. English Wikipedia says the company already sold own-brand products under the Wilko name, and that shoppers used “Wilko” as an informal name for the shops, before it began rebranding the stores themselves as Wilko in 2012; most had changed by 2014. Statements from the administrators and from the later owner, as printed by Housewares Live in September 2023 and Retail Gazette in October 2023, spell the name in lower case, as “wilko.”

Own-label goods sat at the centre of the offer. Chris Dawson, who founded The Range in Plymouth in 1989, told Retail Gazette in December 2024 that Wilko had been known for health and beauty, cleaning, toiletries and small DIY items. The reopened Uxbridge store, Retail Gazette reported in November 2024, stocked cleaning and laundry, decorating and DIY, home and garden, and pet care. In March 2018, English Wikipedia says, Wilko began selling 285 of its own-brand products in Dubai through Ace Hardware, the first time its goods were sold by another retailer.

Competition sharpened in the chain’s last decade. Retail Gazette wrote on 10 August 2023 that Wilko had filled the gap left by the collapse of Woolworths in 2008 but had since faced growing competition from value retailers including B&M, Poundland and Home Bargains, and it cited GlobalData research showing that B&M, Home Bargains and The Range had all overtaken Wilko in non-food market share since 2015. Before the end, the same report said, the company had borrowed from the restructuring specialist Hilco, cut jobs and sold distribution centres in Worksop, and credit insurers had withdrawn cover in October 2022. It had also deferred supplier payments and asked landlords to move to monthly rents, the report said, and many suppliers then asked for payment up front, which left gaps on its shelves for much of the final year. In March 2017, English Wikipedia says, Wilko gave a five-year logistics contract to Wincanton, replacing a haulier it had used for 29 years.

How discount and variety retailers present themselves.

Discount and variety retailers tend to put their offer into the name itself. Some chains take a price as their name, as Poundland did in 1990 and 99p Stores did after it; others use initials, a family name or a short invented word. When a chain built on a single price begins to sell items above it, the name stays on the fascia while the range changes behind it, and advertising rules can then limit what the shop is allowed to say about its prices.

The fascia carries most of the identity. A shop sign on a high street or retail park usually pairs the name with a short strapline, such as B&M’s “Big Brands, Big Savings,” described by The Grocer in 2020. Inside, the same name and colours tend to repeat on aisle headers, shelf tickets, seasonal end displays and carrier bags, so that a shopper sees one consistent mark from the car park to the till.

Own-label naming is a quieter part of the system. Variety chains often sell well-known brands alongside goods under their own labels, and some suppliers prefer their products to appear under a retailer’s name rather than their own. Formats are named in the same plain way: a home store, a local convenience shop, an express branch, each a variation on the parent name rather than a separate brand.

The corporate side is published separately. Listed or formerly listed chains keep investor pages with dated histories of founders, owners, acquisitions and listings, and those pages, read alongside independent press, are a dependable guide to who owns a fascia at any given time. In this sector ownership changes often, through buyouts, listings, sales and administrations, and the guides in this series give those changes with their dates.

Administration in 2023, and a new owner.

Wilko Limited entered administration on 10 August 2023, appointing PwC, after attempts to agree a solvent sale failed, Retail Gazette reported that day. No buyer was found for the business as a whole. Housewares Live reported on 14 September 2023 that B&M had agreed to take on a group of stores and Poundland 71 shops, which Poundland said it would convert to its own name, while The Range had bought Wilko’s brand, website and intellectual property, with 36 staff from the digital team moving across. English Wikipedia says the last stores under the old ownership closed on 8 October 2023. The Wilko chain that the Wilkinson family had built over 93 years stopped trading then.

The name came back under new ownership. The Range’s parent, CDS Superstores, relaunched the Wilko website in October 2023 and began selling Wilko products in The Range’s stores, Retail Gazette reported on 27 October 2023. Standalone Wilko stores followed: Retail Gazette reported on 22 November 2024 that a two-floor shop in Uxbridge, west London, had opened after Poole, Exeter, Luton, Plymouth, St Albans and Rotherham, with self-service terminals offering the online range of more than 100,000 products. The December 2024 interview described the first openings as test stores, in which the owner brought back a food-to-go range that the previous management had dropped, added an in-store partnership with Iceland, offered click-and-collect through The Range’s network of more than 200 stores and trialled a Café Eighty Nine café in the Exeter branch. In October 2023 the owner had said it would give former Wilko staff priority when recruiting for the new shops, Retail Gazette reported. The same publication reported in December 2024 that the new owner had launched a first Wilko kitchen range, followed by a bathroom range, and in June 2025 that CDS was looking for 20,000 to 25,000 sq ft units for more Wilko stores. Wilko now trades as a brand, a website and a small group of shops within CDS Superstores, not as the family business that went into administration.

For a design guide, Wilko shows how a short own-label nickname can become the name over the door and then outlive the chain itself. Compare Poundland and B&M, which both took over former Wilko shops in 2023. For this guide we use a high-street red, charcoal and a warm white with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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