The history of Galon
The word that became a material
Everyone knows what galon is. Few know where the word comes from.
It began in Gamlestaden, a district of Gothenburg, at Gamlestadsvägen 14, where the Gamlestaden Faux Leather Factory (Gamlestadens Konstläderfabrik) manufactured a fabric-backed plastic sheeting that was about to get a name of its own. The factory building was erected under a 1945 building permit, designed by architect Albert Gustafsson, expressly for the production of faux leather — and was extended in 1951 to its present appearance, to designs by Sture Högstedt. The factory took the first two letters of its own name and the last three of nylon, the era’s cutting-edge material: GA plus LON became GALON. The company eventually took the name Galon AB itself, and its advertising was unambiguous — GALON® was a registered trademark manufactured by a single factory. Anyone who wanted genuine galon knew exactly where to go.
The material clothed Sweden. Car seats, bus seats and aircraft seats, bags, tablecloths and furniture — and the rainwear generations of children have worn in the preschool cloakroom queue ever since. The hang tags carried the promise in three words: waterproof, hard-wearing, colourfast. The factory kept experimenting too: its range included Galonyll, a patent-pending material built on wool, meant to keep the wearer warm while damping condensation — the factory’s own attempt, seventy years early, at solving the very problem today’s membrane manufacturers still wrestle with.
Success soon demanded more space than Gamlestadsvägen could offer — and the move was no retreat, but proof of how well things were going. As early as March 1953 a new, modern factory stood ready; the Gothenburg Building Technology Association paid a study visit to “Galon AB — the new factory” that same spring. Production moved to the emerging Högsbo industrial area in Västra Frölunda, to the address Frögatan 4 — where the company is listed in the 1971 edition of Sveriges Handelskalender, Sweden’s business directory, with the telegraphic address Galonfabrik and the telex code GALON S. In a sense, the factory building still stands today: when the Köpcentrum 421 shopping centre opened in November 2006, the Gothenburg newspaper GT wrote that “the old galon factory has been converted into a modern shopping centre,” next door to Pripps’ former premises. The address today is Lona Knapes gata, and the largest tenant is ICA Maxi. By the mid-1960s, Gamlestadsvägen had been vacated entirely, and in 1965 new businesses began moving into the old premises. In Högsbo, the factory carried on at full strength: in 1967, director Bengt Flodin lectured at the Building Technology Association on the manufacture and use of Galon, chiefly Bygg-Galon — “construction galon” for the building trade — and that same autumn the association’s study visit went to the Galon factory.
Galon AB was not just one of the new area’s pioneers — the company helped organise it. On 12 December 1966, the area’s companies gathered at Galon AB, and on the initiative of director Erik Lindeblad — the same man who, fifteen years earlier, had taken on the Swedish Academy over the word — the Högsbo Industrial Association was formed: around a hundred companies joining forces over shared concerns such as roads, pedestrian crossings and street lighting. The association still exists today, under the name Högsbo-Sisjö Business Association. By then, the word had already left the factory and made its way into the language — and the expertise behind it would prove just as long-lived.
The expertise moves on
By then, Galon was not just a word — it was one of Swedish industry’s strong trademarks. When the business became part of the investment company AB Fannyudde’s sphere in the 1970s, Galon AB was ranked, alongside Jästbolaget (Sweden’s yeast company) itself, among the portfolio’s most significant holdings, and the brand remained strong and profitable as the group passed to Pripps and later to Beijerinvest. In other words, it was an asset owners counted on — not a leftover that simply came along with the deal.
The legacy then split into two branches. The trademark and the wallpaper side entered the wallpaper industry, where the GALON marks were later held by Eco-Tapeter and Boråstapeter — still visible in the trademark registers today. The coating business, the very core of the expertise, took a different path through Swedish and international industry. According to Bo Stage — who himself joined the business in 1986 and carries its history — it was bought by Beckers Lay-Tech within the Beckers paint group, moved on to Perstorp Components, and in 1996 became part of the American automotive group Collins & Aikman. After four years within the American group, the business was sold, and in 2000 Scandinavian Coating AB was founded in Gothenburg by former employees of the operation, Bo Stage among them. They brought with them machinery from galon’s golden years — including a calender built in 1968 — and the production of fabric for rainwear and protective equipment continued in Gothenburg well into the 2000s.
The 1968 calender ran right up until 2024, when it was dismantled in Sisjön in Västra Frölunda — in the same industrial belt the factory once moved to from Gamlestaden, a couple of kilometres from Frögatan. A machine that had served for 56 years, through a succession of owners, from galon’s golden years into our own time. In March 2026, Scandinavian Coating was declared bankrupt. There, the history of Swedish galon manufacturing ends. Abruptly.
One detail in the chain is hard not to smile at: Perstorp, the group that for a time carried the galon legacy, is the very same group that today manufactures the renewable plasticiser used in Farmerrain’s fabrics. Tradition and renewal run through the same hands — only the country where the fabric is made has changed.
The trademark — and why we say “galon fabric”
The battle against becoming an everyday word began early. The word spread so fast that galon already appeared in the 1950 edition of the Swedish Academy’s dictionary (SAOL) in the sense of
“fabric coated with plastic” — barely a decade after its launch. In April 1951, Erik Lindeblad of Galon Aktiebolag wrote to SAOL’s editor, Pelle Holm, requesting that the next edition state that Galon was a registered trademark for the factory’s goods. The Academy never agreed; instead, the entry was struck from the 1973 edition, along with Plexiglas and a number of other brand names. The company fought for its mark — but the word had already won.
Trademark protection for GALON lapsed over time: the Swedish registrations were struck off the register, and an EU registration from 1996 expired in 2006. This is sometimes referred to as “the patent running out” — legally, it was trademark protection, not a patent. By then, the word had long since become a generic term in Swedish, and once a word has become generic, the basic rule of trademark law says it can no longer be newly registered for the goods it denotes. It is the same rule that means no one can register “thermos” or “dynamite” today.
In 2013, GALON was instead registered as an EU trademark for clothing. EU trademarks are examined by the EU agency EUIPO, in a system where policing potential grounds for refusal relies heavily on market participants raising objections themselves — and where a word’s everyday meaning in one particular language is not always caught the way it would be in a national examination. Today’s Galon® is a PU material from a different manufacturer, with no connection to the factory in Gamlestaden or to what was once called genuine galon.
That is why, at Farmerrain, we use the word the way the language uses it: galon fabric — plastic-coated textile, in our case a PVC-coated fabric with a recycled backing and a renewable plasticiser, double-welded and built to be repaired. It is no copy of the old material. It is the same idea, done better: waterproof, hard-wearing, colourfast.