12/07/2025

"Fire Queen" Brand (c. 1930s)

A sweet, simple and regal label today! “Impregnated Fire Queen” sounds like a FromSoftware boss.. Interesting how a name like that has parallels between vintage matchboxes and video games!

There’s no clue on the label itself but cursory searches reliably suggest that the matches were made in Latvia and then exported to England for sale. There are many different developments of Fire Queen labels, with this one being the earliest example. It’s not always a reliable factor, but generally the lower the number of matches advertised the earlier the label falls in the timeline.

These matches started to be manufactured in the 1930s and ran until the late 1950s (seemingly at least, I’m going off of secondary information that I can’t absolutely confirm in this case). Our label is likely the first example of this type, so it dates to the 1930s approximately. In this era standard designs like this became slightly more common, they were cheaper to make and relied more on a prominent brand name to garner customers.

Regarding the design, it’s as simple as they get really, but there’s still something quaint about that. It relies more on the fitting and catchy name rather than a stylish design, which is still a bit of a missed opportunity. I'd like to have seen what this fire queen looked like if the designer was given a different brief (I tried to give it a try myself, but it looked like a Princess Leia birthday cake).