While Foot Locker (despite its horribly crowded stores) and Champs are the most ubiquitous and "cool" sporting good stores across the nation, the lesser prominent The Athlete's Foot has always felt, at least to me, like the ugly duckling of the industry. Never quite shiny, nor the music loud enough and, if I remember correctly, they had a dopey running track going around all their stores. In an effort to position itself better, The Athlete's has been trying to implement "next generartion" stores that their franchises are encouraged to adopt. Coupled with a new retail presence is a new logo and a push to be known for the odd acronym of "TAF."
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One conglomerate tier (or two, or fifteen) below Walmart is another recent client of New York-based Lippincott, Quick Chek, a chain of more than 100 convenience stores located in and around the state of New Jersey founded in 1966. Last month Quick Chek unveiled a new identity, and private-label developed product packaging developed by Lippincott that help emphasize the store's commitment to fresh food, including their brewed-every-twenty-minutes coffee. The old logo felt like a bland and blunt New Jersey convenience store that looked more like a companion to a gas station, while the new logo and identity definitely improve the store's appearance and its products, with a look more aligned with a sandwich or fresh produce shop. I really like the new icon, and how it has a little depth by using two colors to form the letter Q. The typography is forgettable, nothing to worry about but nothing to praise either, maybe a geometric sans would have added some interest. Overall, this is a great visual upgrade for a modest chain of stores that will likely benefit from the added differentiation that its design will provide it, specially against the innumerable amount of convenience stores peppered through the state. A few more images below.
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In what has to be the most under whelming unveiling yet — and a bad case of stolen thunder — for one of the largest retailers in the world, Walmart (unhyphenated as a single word from now on) just uploaded a formal, band-aid of a press release to their web site confirming the logo change that surfaced over the weekend when The Wall Street Journal reported that the Memphis and Shelby County Division of Planning and Development had received documents from Walmart with the intent of opening a prototype store there. An artist rendering on those documents showed a new sign over the facade of the proposed store.
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Note: The original logo shown above is the original. The new one has been tweaked a little, but I don't have a clear image of it to show.
The big news of the day has, undeniably, been Starbucks. The free coffee for 30 minutes sure helped. But also, it's been a news item in the making since the 1990s when Starbucks started its insurmountable growth that would eventually come to compromise and cripple its original modus operandi of small, personable and unique. Or, less ominously, the news has been brewing (sorry!) since January of this year, when Howard Schultz took the reigns back as CEO — after an eight year respite from running the coffee empire he set ablaze in 1987 when he bought Starbucks — in order to resuscitate the unimaginably flailing brand. And, today, surrounding the unveiling of a new coffee bean, the Pike Place Roast, Starbucks unleashed an unprecedented wave of brand nostalgia by deploying the original Starbucks logo on the masses, starting with a sad replica of the original store, in New York's Bryant Park.
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The once-textile-manufacturer turned-ski-manufacturer Rossignol — which was purchased by Quicksilver in 2005 and looks like it's now being sold — has now evolved from a snowsport brand to become a "Mountain Lifestyle Brand." This shift is reinforced by their current rebranding, replacing a forgettable, gradient-enabled and beveled "R" with a return to their original and energetic script "R." The new one-color solution is graphically much stronger and contrasts well with the revised DIN-inspired typography. From their release:
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Sunglass Hut International, a purveyor of fashionable sunglasses and eyewear, is in the midst of rolling out a new brand identity to its 1,500 retail stores located in malls and other high-density retail areas around the globe. The new identity, developed by everyone’s favorite, Wolff Olins and retail specialist FRCH Cincinnati, has already been unveiled in Europe, and is only now just starting to make its public debut here in the United States, replacing an interim identity plaguing some applications, like the web site. The result has been a confusing image for an iconic sunglass retailer — one that is not nearly as distinctive as the one that it replaces.
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To continue with our supermarket streak (three in a row, booyah!) at Brand New I would like to offer a, well, brand new entrant into the category. Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market (yes, that's the official full name) is a new chain of supermarkets opening in the West Coast of the United States, with 30 stores planned to open in the states of Arizona, California and Nevada by the end of 2007. The new venture is headed by UK-based Tesco, one of the world's largest retailers ("the world's third-largest retailer, behind Wal-Mart of the United States and Carrefour of France" according to Wikipedia). Launching the store and its associated 1,500-plus SKUs, Tesco worked with three agencies to complete the project, U.S.-based marketing / communications / anythingelse firm Deutsch Inc., U.K.-based and independently-owned branding agency Pemberton & Whitefoord (P&W), and U.K.-based and retail-specialized design and fabrication company Schorleaf. (The invoices from all three combined could probably buy you three or four of those islands near Dubai).
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If you can't tell the difference between the two logos above, that's because there isn't. Pathmark is a 40-year-old supermarket chain with 140+ stores in the states of New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Delaware and is currently the 31st out of the top 75 supermarkets in the nation according to Supermarket News and, earlier this year, it launched a 55,400-square-foot protoype store in Kinnelon, New Jersey to capitalize on its new branding and merchandising initiative, "Go Fresh, Go Local". So while the logo has stayed the same, the real changes have happened inside.
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As part of a R110 million (US$16 million+) rebranding effort by Pick n Pay — a 40-year-old supermarket chain in South Africa, and one of its largest retail groups — that includes converting 450 stores and 1,200 product lines within a 24 month period, the store is taking the opportunity to update with a new logo that does away with its dated-looking use of slab serifs to embrace the ever-so-modern san serif.
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Toys R Us, Inc. finally trimmed a thread of frivolous grammatical imposition from their logo. The company's new legal name is Toys R Us...(no quotation marks around the backwards R). The star has been stuffed into the engorged R in order to make a tight and simple(r) wordmark which is less patriotic, more bulbous and more fun.
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(Total Number of Pages in Retailers: 2)
