Hudson's Bay Co., founded in 1670 by King Charles II, is a huge Canadian retailer with over 600 retail locations all across Canada. They have four diverse outfits: The Bay is their full-line department store, Zellers is their mass-merchandise department store, Home Outfitters is the kitchen, bed and bath arm of the operations, and Field's (sorry, no site) follows up as the deep discount offering.
Looking to the previous brand identity for Hbc, one would guess that the four color stripes twisting through the black box represented each of their outfits — though that's where the visual connections clearly end. The creative Director for Arcade Agency (the firm hired to handle the redesign), Pablo Mozo sums it up well: "The problem with the old logo was that no one knows what HBC meant and what that represented… Was it a TV station? Was it a bank?". NRDC Equity Partners, who bought Hbc back in 2008 and instigated the rebranding, decided to move away from the Hbc acronym and return to using the full name "Hudson's Bay Co." This shift back to their roots was echoed in Arcade Agency's design which repurposed the original company coat of arms to create a modern crest that included Hbc's four emblematic colors. As Mozo notes: "It's definitely steeped in tradition, in terms of stripes and the crest, but made clean and modern to show that it's still relevant today… It's taking the heritage and updating it without reinventing it."
This redesign is a vast improvement, providing more context and heritage than the previous, generic logo. The rendering is clean, consistent and scales well without being overly cold or lacking character. While it could be argued that the current identity has little to do with retail outfits, this is a corporate logo that will likely find itself more often beside the likes of Olympic logos (as they're currently a national partner) than featured prominently in department stores. It was a smart move to leverage a heritage that helped build a nation rather than searching for some trendy visual gimmicks. Plus, think of all the great opportunities there are to extract the visual elements of a fox, cervidae and beavers (ok I admit, I'm exaggerating a bit)! Overall, a vast improvement that should see them through for a while.
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