September 26 will be the 210th birthday of Peugeot as a company. That’s not the date it made its first car, of course; if Peugeot had knocked up an automobile in 1810 it would have been 76 years ahead of Carl Benz and his Benz Patent Motor Car, widely recognised as the first automobile ever made.
The company’s de facto founder, Jean-Pierre Peugeot, was an industrialist with interests in weaving, dying fabric and producing flour. Then in 1810 his sons Jean-Pierre II and Jean Frederic transformed one his grain mills into a steel foundry and began producing stuff like umbrella frames, bikes, saws and coffee grinders.
Objects that grind stuff were a particular success for the company in its formative years, with Peugeot making a wooden pepper grinder that became a classic for its exceptional functionality and durability; even today a branch of the company still makes pepper grinders and other household utensils under the Peugeot name and using the distinctive lion logo.
An offshoot of the Peugeot company formed in the mid 19th Century, led by Jean-Pierre Peugeot’s grandson Armand, which began making bicycles at first, followed by steam powered tricycles and then, by 1890, an internal combustion engined car – just four years after Carl Benz’s epoch-defining creation.
The new logo, then. Designed with a detailed lion motif, it stands on top of an arrow to represent the oldest existing Peugeot logo, registered in 1858, which back then represented the three qualities of a Peugeot saw blade: flexibility, strength and cutting speed. Today it also, according to Peugeot, “enshrines the notion of speed”.
The logo will appear on all Peugeot marketing material from 26 September, on which date the company says it will release a video focusing on the history of the brand.
Keyword: Peugeot hits 210 years old, designs new logo