Triumph Logo History

1885–1906: A Name and a Shield

Siegfried Bettmann was born in Nuremberg in 1863 and moved to England in 1883. In London he set up S. Bettmann & Co, an import and export agency; sources date it to 1884, 1885 or 1886. The business sold bicycles made by others, and by 1886 it was selling them under the name Triumph. Bettmann is often said to have chosen the word because it would be understood in most European languages. That explanation is widely repeated, but we have not been able to trace it to his own words.

In 1887 he was joined by Mauritz Johann Schulte, another German, who became his partner and general manager. (Census records spell his first name "Moritz". Earlier versions of this page called him "Mauritius".) The company moved to Coventry, the centre of the British cycle trade, and was making its own Triumph bicycles there by 1889. In February 1897 a new company, the New Triumph Cycle Co, was registered to take over the business, and in June it was renamed the Triumph Cycle Co Ltd. (Some histories give 1887 and mention backing from Dunlop. That appears to be the 1897 date copied wrongly: the Dunlop tyre company was not formed until 1889.)

The first Triumph motorcycle followed in 1902: essentially a strengthened bicycle with a Belgian Minerva engine.

The first logo we can date is in its advertising. In Motor Cycling of 3 November 1902, Triumph advertised its "2 H.P. Motor Bicycle for 1903" under two ornate shields. Each carries a "TRIUMPH" ribbon, crossed flags around a central "TRIUMPH" roundel, the words "CYCLE Co LTD", a "COVENTRY" scroll and "TRADE MARK". Triumph itself calls the 1902 shield the first trade-marked logo, "a heraldic crest design that incorporated the company name, Triumph Cycle Co. Ltd and the city of manufacture, Coventry".

Two things are less certain than logo websites suggest. The first is the number of flags: they are clearly there, but at the resolution of the surviving advert we cannot count six. The second is whether the shield was ever fixed to the early motorcycles as a badge. It looks like a bicycle head badge, and it probably came from the bicycle business, but we have not found a 1902–03 motorcycle that carries it.

c.1907–1914: The Script and the Oval

Motorcycle production grew fast: by 1907 Triumph was making around a thousand machines a year. Its advertising moved away from the heraldic shield towards a flowing script "Triumph", with long, looping strokes and an underline that runs back under the word.

Triumph dates the script to 1907 and says it was used "for just seven years". We have not found a dated 1907 example, but the script is certainly in use by 24 June 1911, when it heads an advert set inside a large oval, over the words "Cycles and Motors". Motor cycles then cost from £48 15s.

Logo websites show a separate "Triumph Motors" logo for 1915–1922: the script inside a grey oval with a rope-like border, "Motors" written beneath it. Triumph's own timeline also says "Motors" was added in 1915. The 1911 advert shows that the oval and the word "Motors" were already being used together four years earlier. We have not found the rope-bordered version in a dated period source.

It is also clear that the script never had the field to itself. By 1913 Triumph was using a very different mark, described in the next section, and it is that one that dominates the adverts of the war years and the 1920s. The script did not disappear for good, though: in 2024 Triumph put it back on the tank, in gold.

By 1913: The Swash Wordmark

This is the discovery that rewrites the usual timeline. A Triumph Cycle Co advert of 30 May 1913, "A Triumph Tribute", ends with the word TRIUMPH in bold capitals. The leg of the R runs down and becomes a long curved line that passes under IUMP and rises into a curled tail on the H. The letters are drawn with an outline. It is, unmistakably, the Triumph wordmark: the same design every Triumph rider knows, 23 years before the date usually given for it.

It was not a one-off. The same swash wordmark appears in Triumph adverts from 1922, 1923, 1927 and 1935. In the 1927 "Something to crow about" advert for the 1928 range, the machines are drawn with the wordmark on their tank sides, which is the best evidence we have of how it was applied to the bikes themselves: as a painted-on transfer.

These were the years that made Triumph's reputation. The Model H of 1915 became the standard British despatch rider's machine of the First World War; more than 30,000 Triumphs were supplied to the Allies, and about 57,000 Model H were built in all by 1923. The advertising slogan "Trusty Triumph" came from this period: it appears in the 1922 and 1923 adverts, with a large ghosted "TRUSTY" behind the swash wordmark.

Who designed it? We do not know. No designer is named in any source we have found. What we can say is that it cannot have been Edward Turner, who joined Triumph in 1936.

What about the "colour crest" of the 1920s? Triumph's timeline says the company "reverted to the crest in color during the 1920s", and logo websites show a blue and gold crowned shield for 1923–1932. We have not found it in any 1920s Triumph motorcycle advert or on a period tank; the 1920s adverts we have seen all use the swash wordmark. A reproduction of the coloured crest circulates online, but its source is not recorded. It may have been used on bicycles or in other material. Treat it as unconfirmed on motorcycles.

Early 1930s: The Globe

From 1923 the Triumph company also built cars, and by the early 1930s the car side was taking more and more of its money and attention. Its emblem was a globe, with the slogan "Triumph All Over The World".

The globe is well documented as a car badge: pre-war Triumph cars carried it on the radiator, and British Motor Heritage records it on car grilles until 1953 and on hub caps until 1968. BMH says it was "shared by Triumph cars and motorcycles back in the early 1930s", and Triumph's own timeline lists a 1932 "oval globe logo, superseded in 1934".

We have not found any evidence of a Triumph motorcycle carrying it. The motorcycle adverts of 1930–35 use a stencil-style TRIUMPH or the swash wordmark, and we have seen no period tank, transfer or badge with the globe. The most likely explanation is that the globe was a corporate and car device of the Triumph company at a time when cars and motorcycles were still one business, and that later logo histories filed it under motorcycles. If a globe-badged motorcycle turns up, we will happily correct this.

1936–1990: Sangster, Turner and the Keyline

The car business nearly sank the company. In January 1936 the motorcycle side was sold to Jack Sangster, who already owned Ariel, and became the Triumph Engineering Co Ltd. (The cars stayed with the Triumph Motor Company, which went into receivership in 1939 and was bought by Standard in 1944. The two Triumphs have been separate ever since; the car trade mark is now owned by BMW.) Sangster brought Edward Turner from Ariel as general manager and chief designer. Turner's Speed Twin of 1937 set the pattern for British motorcycles for the next forty years.

According to Triumph, the logo was redrawn at the same time. In its words, the logo "was created by draftsman Herbert Hopwood alongside Edward Turner", and it was "updated again in 1936 with a bolder font and keyline". Given the 1913 advert, the fair reading is that Hopwood and Turner refined the existing swash wordmark: heavier letters, a clean outline, and the tail tidied into the shape that would stay on Triumph tanks until 1990. Triumph's head of brand management later described the result: the serif letters and the "sweeping line from the R to the left of the H" were "very much the design flavour of the day", and the T was drawn to suggest a piston in a cylinder. That last point is Triumph's own reading; we have found no 1930s source for it.

From transfer to badge. The late 1930s is also when Triumph tanks changed from transfers to fitted badges. According to a detailed guide to the rigid-frame Triumphs, the 1937 bikes had transfers on chrome-plated tanks with painted panels; 1938 brought the first screwed-on badges, made of brass; and from 1939 the badges were die-cast alloy, of the kind used after the war. Turner also gave the post-war twins the tank-top parcel grid, fitted from 1949.

The war and after. Triumph's Priory Street works in Coventry were almost destroyed in the Blitz of 14 November 1940. Production restarted at a new factory at Meriden in 1942. In 1951 Sangster sold Triumph to BSA.

The 1950 trade mark. On 15 June 1950 the stylised TRIUMPH wordmark was filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office for motorcycles, and it was registered on 1 January 1952 (No. 552,794). It is still live. It has passed through a dozen owners and is held today by Triumph Designs Ltd, the Hinckley company's trade mark holder, which renewed it in 2022. Few motorcycle logos can show an unbroken legal line that long.

In the 1950s the wordmark sat on a chrome script plate flanked by horizontal styling bands, the "four-bar" look Triumph has since revived as an accessory. It is the badge on Marlon Brando's Thunderbird in The Wild One (1953). Turner, who had a feel for names and emblems, also gave the Thunderbird its own "paper dart" logo.

1957–1983: Mouth Organ, Eyebrow, Picture Frame

From the late 1950s the wordmark itself hardly changed, but the badge around it changed every few years. For anyone dating a Meriden Triumph, the badge is one of the quickest clues. The names below are the ones owners and parts suppliers use; the year ranges come from the part-number listings of the specialist suppliers, which disagree with each other by a year or so at almost every change.

• The "mouth organ" (also "harmonica" or "garden gate"), c.1957–1965. A chrome grille of horizontal bars with the wordmark set across it. 1957 is usually given as its first year. There are different versions for the 3-gallon tank (part F4127/F4128) and the 4-gallon tank (F4766/F4767).
• The "eyebrow", 1966 to 1967 or 1968. Introduced with the slimmer teardrop tank, which lost the parcel grid: a single sweeping chrome arch over the wordmark (F6887/F6888).
• The "picture frame", late 1960s to 1979. A chrome surround with the wordmark on a painted infill (82-9700/82-9701). Some suppliers call it the "high brow", and the names "eyebrow" and "picture frame" are sometimes swapped. The T150 Trident had badges of its own.

Meriden fights back. The BSA group collapsed in the early 1970s. On 14 September 1973 its successor, Norton Villiers Triumph, announced that Meriden would close; the workers occupied the factory. In March 1975 they restarted production as the Meriden Motorcycle Co-operative, with government loans, building the T140 Bonneville. In 1977 the co-op bought the Triumph marketing rights.

Its bikes carried a mix of badges and transfers. The 1981 Royal Wedding Bonneville had a plain Triumph badge on the UK tank and the old picture-frame badge on the US tank; the 1982 T140 TSX used decals. The late co-op bikes, such as the T140W TSS, wore a cast gold and black wordmark. The co-operative went into liquidation on 23 August 1983.

1983–2005: Hinckley Blue

In 1983 the Official Receiver sold the Triumph name and manufacturing rights to John Bloor, a builder from the Midlands. While he planned a new factory, he licensed Les Harris's Racing Spares, in Newton Abbot, Devon, to keep the Bonneville alive; 1,255 Harris Bonnevilles were built between June 1985 and the end of the licence in March 1988.

Bloor's own motorcycles were launched at the Cologne show in September 1990: six models built on a modular design, the Trophy, Trident and Daytona. The first, the Trophy 1200, reached customers in March 1991. They came from a new factory at Hinckley, in Leicestershire, and wore a new version of the logo.

Triumph describes the thinking. The logo "needed another evolution that reflected the amazing renaissance of the business and the energy of the motorcycle boom of the 90's", so the team "sharpened all elements and repositioned the smile line". The letters became sharper, with angular serifs; the keyline stayed; and the logo was now blue. Triumph's 2024 summary calls it "a subtle evolution of the brand". We have not found who drew it.

The Hinckley wordmark was filed as a US trade mark on 29 August 1994 and registered on 6 May 1997 (No. 2,059,661), for engines and parts, citing the 1952 registration as a predecessor. On the early triples it was painted on the tank, often on a contrasting panel.

When the Bonneville name returned, at the Munich show in September 2000 as a 2001 model, it brought back a chrome grille-style tank badge that recalls the Meriden bikes.

2002: A Hundred Years, and a Fire

2002 was the hundredth year of Triumph motorcycles, and it began badly. On the night of 15 March 2002 a fire destroyed much of the Hinckley factory, just as the company was preparing its centenary. Production restarted about six months later.

The centenary was marked with special editions, among them a Centennial Bonneville T100 and a 955i Daytona Centenary Edition. A centenary device also exists: a laurel wreath around "100 Years 1902–2002", flanked by a Union Flag and a chequered flag, over the wordmark. We have not been able to find where Triumph used it, whether on bikes, clothing or dealer material, so we show it here as an anniversary emblem rather than a change to the logo.

2005–2013: Losing the Keyline

In 2005 the logo lost its outline. Triumph's own words: the 1990 logo was "refreshed again in 2005 by removing the keyline". The letters, the serifs and the smile line stayed. Some logo websites say the serifs went too in 2005; they did not, as the logo of this period shows. That change came in 2013.

On the bikes, the chrome grille badge of the Bonneville family carried the wordmark through these years.

2013–Present: Sans-Serif and the Triangle

At the end of 2013 Triumph introduced the logo it uses today. The design press credited it to the London office of Wolff Olins; one contemporary account adds that Rick Banks assisted with the lettering, but we have not found that confirmed by either party. The design site Brand New reviewed it in January 2014 under the headline "Sans Triumphs Over Flared".

What changed, in Triumph's account, was "symmetrical letter spacing" and less serif detail, while the rounded corners were kept. The letters are now an even, sans-serif capital; the smile line survives, running from the R under the letters to the H. The standard colour is black. The brief, Triumph says, was to make the logo better represent "the breadth of new products and categories Triumph had grown into". (One account of the brief dates it to 2015. Triumph's own timeline, and the coverage of January 2014, put the new logo in 2013.)

The triangle. Alongside the wordmark came a new badge: a downward-pointing triangle with a stylised T, often with the wordmark across its top. Logo websites describe its shapes as "mechanical wings". Triumph gives a different origin: the badge, "with its Union Flag detailing and Triumph logo", was "inspired by the original maker's mark engine badge triangles from the 30's", and was first sketched out with the factory's engineers.

The current wordmark is protected internationally under an international registration of 2017 (No. 1,350,647), and a US application for it, covering clothing, was still pending in September 2026. Triumph has not changed the main logo since 2013.

2013: The Triangle Badge

2020–2024: The Old Marks Come Back

Triumph has leaned on its past without changing its main logo.

• 2020: the Triumph Heritage clothing range revived the 1936 wordmark, the Hopwood and Turner version. It had, in Triumph's words, "stepped back from corporate use" in 1990.
• October 2024: Triumph announced seven Icon Edition Modern Classics: the Bonneville T100, Bonneville T120, Scrambler 900, Scrambler 1200 X and XE, Bonneville Bobber and Bonneville Speedmaster. Each has Sapphire Black and Aluminium Silver paint, hand-painted coach lining and the 1907 script in gold on the tank. Triumph says the script "has not been seen on an official Triumph tank for more than 100 years". The bikes reached dealers in December 2024.

The script and the swash, the two marks of the Edwardian company, are both back in use more than a century later.