Marc O’Polo

Marc O’Polo was founded in Stockholm in 1967 by two Swedes, Rolf Lind and Göte Huss, and an American, Jerry O. Sheets. The first collection piece by the three founders is a patchwork shirt made from hand-woven Indian cotton. The proposition was simple. While the competition offered shirts made of non-iron and crease-resistant polyester, Marc O’Polo was focusing on natural materials.

The company never wanted to be rebellious or overly fashionable. Instead, it went against the mainstream and focused on high-quality, timeless yet modern products. When the founders met their future German partner Werner Böck at a Cologne trade show in 1968, his reaction summed up how the early collections landed in a polyester-saturated market. “It wasn’t only new, but revolutionary!” Böck recalls today.

Menswear was part of the label almost from the start, broadening from that first patchwork shirt into a full men’s line by the early 1970s alongside the brand’s parallel push into women’s wear. In the early 1970s, Marc O’Polo expanded the collection into complete women’s and men’s lines and introduced the brand Campus.

This was followed by the development of the logo sweatshirt. Until then, only athletes had worn hoodies, sweatshirts and zipper jackets. Marc O’Polo emblazoned the designs with a large logo. Across Europe, Marc O’Polo sweatshirts became the epitome of youthful, everyday fashion in the 1980s.

The design vocabulary settled around cotton, wool and organic cotton knits, button-down shirts in cotton with some polyester for shape retention, fitted cuts meant to sit over jeans or chinos, and polo shirts and sweaters in crew, V and turtleneck collars. Culturally, the label sat alongside other European casual wear names of the era like Best Company and Chevignon, capturing the youth culture of the era and becoming a firm favourite with the old skool ravers.

Industry recognition followed, with Marc O’Polo winning the German fashion industry’s “Oscar”, the Forum Award of the trade journal TextilWirtschaft, for outstanding entrepreneurial and personal performance with a sustained impact on the development of the fashion industry.

The company’s center of gravity shifted from Sweden to Germany as the business scaled. In 1997, the company’s original distribution partner for Germany, Werner Böck, expanded his shareholdings, founding Marc O’Polo International GmbH, which is responsible for all the company operations including design, production, distribution and marketing. The same year, Marc O’Polo relocated its headquarters from Stockholm to Stephanskirchen in the district of Rosenheim.

Leadership has since passed to the next generation, with Maximilian Böck, son of the Böck family of entrepreneurs, taking over the CEO position in 2021 as the company launched its own online store in another 18 countries. Today, the label operates as a German-Swedish casual wear business dressing a broad European customer who wants cotton knits, denim, sweatshirts and shirting for daily wear outside the suit-and-tie market.