Mervyn's: A Rebrand
Mervyn’s [Re]Brand Design
If you wandered a mall in the U.S. sometime between 1949 and 2008, you might know the name Mervyn’s. It was a middle-scale department store that had quite a popular “open, open, open” Black Friday commercial that I still like to quote for fun to this day, more than a decade after closing their doors.
I thought it would be fun to re-think the wordmark of the brand, asking the question, “what if I took the Mervyn’s name and made it a high-end department store — along the lines of a Nordstrom, or even a Bloomingdale’s?” Well, here’s my answer…
And of course, like other departments stores, the new Mervyn’s I imagined has its own little cafe, and I called it Creamer.
A cafe was perfect because the curve I used in the “e” and in the submark resembled a drip or pour when its ends were extended.
The submark uses the curve from the “e”
At first, I wanted to play with that and the first “e” in the name so it resembled a cup with coffee streaming out of it. But the legibility got lost in translation a bit, so I opted to go simple and used that as a brand icon for packaging.
Do you see the coffee cup in the “e”?
