Some things become so much a part of a place that eventually, you stop noticing them. The bakery you pass every morning. The bus you know without checking the timetable. The grocery store you duck into for milk and leave carrying ingredients for dinner and at least three things that weren't on the list.
In Vaud, Migros has had 80 years to become that familiar. The first Migros store in Lausanne opened on 25 November 1946, just a few weeks after the Société coopérative Migros Lausanne was established in the presence of Migros founder Gottlieb Duttweiler. By the following March, it counted 397 cooperative members, 12 employees and an annual turnover of 1.2 million francs.
And then it grew — alongside the canton around it. In 1956, three camions-magasins began making their way through Vaud, bringing the shop to the customer rather than the other way around. Signal de Bougy's Parc Pré Vert and restaurant followed in 1971. A year later, the canton got its first MMM at the Centre commercial de Crissier, with what must have felt at the time like an enormous 7,500 square metres of retail space. And in 1973, Migros Lausanne officially became Migros Vaud.
There are plenty more dates we could add to that timeline. But dates only tell part of an 80-year story. Because somewhere between 1946 and today, Migros also accumulated something harder to catalogue: familiarity.
It became woven into grocery runs and school lunches, lake picnics and weekend hikes, hurried dinners and elaborate ones. The products changed. The stores changed. Vaud changed. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, Migros became part of the everyday language of living here. Which makes an 80th anniversary an interesting thing to celebrate. How do you tell the story of something so familiar that most of us have stopped really looking at it? You ask an artist to look again.
For its anniversary, Migros Vaud turned to Vevey-based artist Fichtre and gave him a rather ambitious canvas: eight decades of history, told through the places, symbols and stories of the canton.
The resulting fresco doesn't read like a corporate timeline. It's bright and busy, filled with landscapes, characters and small details that reward a closer look. Moments from Migros Vaud's history sit alongside recognizable pieces of the region, allowing chronology and place to overlap.
And perhaps that's a more fitting way to tell an 80-year story. Because the history of a place isn't experienced as a list of dates. We remember fragments: a shop that used to be there. A logo that looked different. Something our parents always bought. A landscape we recognize immediately. The things that seemed completely ordinary at the time and somehow became nostalgia later.
There is another reason the fresco feels particularly appropriate: Migros Vaud's story is, quite literally, a regional one. It began as Migros Lausanne before becoming Société coopérative Migros Vaud in 1973, with its headquarters established in Ecublens. Decades later, in 2006, the label “De la région. Pour la région.” arrived in Migros Vaud stores.
That relationship between institution and place is ultimately what Fichtre's fresco captures so well. Migros provides the chronology; Vaud provides the landscape around it. And after 80 years, the two are rather difficult to separate.
This anniversary project hasn't stayed on the wall. After appearing through Migros Vaud's anniversary exhibitions, pieces of Fichtre's illustrated world are now making their way onto a limited-edition collection. There is something fitting about the progression: an archive became an illustration, the illustration became an exhibition, and now fragments of it are heading back out into the canton that inspired them.
The limited-edition collection launches at Centre Migros Crissier on 7 September, where it will be available until 19 September, before moving to Chablais from 23 September to 3 October, or while stocks last. To mark the launch, we're giving away two pieces from the collaboration.
Eighty years is long enough for something to disappear into the landscape. Perhaps that's the curious thing about institutions that endure. Eventually, their history stops feeling like history at all. It becomes the backdrop: familiar signs, familiar places, ordinary routines repeated so many times that we rarely stop to consider how long they've been there — or how much they've witnessed.
For its 80th anniversary, Migros Vaud could have simply looked backwards. Instead, Fichtre has taken some of those familiar pieces, rearranged them, brightened them up and put them back in front of us. An invitation, perhaps, to notice them again.
Feeling lucky? As part of its 80th anniversary celebrations, Migros Vaud is also giving away a car every month throughout 2026. Spend CHF 80 or more in a Migros Vaud supermarket to receive a unique participation code, then enter it online for your chance to win. Find more details here.
