Viking Direct
office supplies retailer
Viking Direct, trading as Viking, is a European office supply mail order and online company based in Europe. It has operations in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Netherlands, and Germany and operates in a number of European countries. Its United Kingdom headquarters is in Leicester and its Netherlands headquarters is in Venlo and is registered in Ireland. The company is a mail order and online seller of office supplies to small and medium sized business.
Since 2021 it has been part of the Raja Group. The company had previously been part of United States based Office Depot which had agreed to sell its European business including Viking as part of a failed merger with Staples in 2016.
History
Viking began in 1960, as a small office supply retailer located in Los Angeles, California. The store was opened on January 7, 1960, by Rolf Ostern. Ostern supplemented the retail operation with a catalogue, and this would become the primary marketing technique of the company. In 1969 Ostern changed the name of his store to Viking Office Supplies and moved to a new location.
“Viking Direct” enters the record as office supplies retailer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Viking, Direct and office can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Viking Direct” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Viking, Direct and office provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20746349. VIAF identifies the subject as 158165635. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2021, 2016, 1960 and 1969.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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- Expand the search: follow Viking Direct primary sources, Viking Direct archive and Viking research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Viking Direct” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.