Ocado Brand Refresh: Purple is the new green
Some eagle-eyed customers may have noticed our brand looks a little… different today. So, what’s behind the change, and why now? It’s simple.
We’re super proud of our branding – from our fruity colours and vans to our distinctive swirl. Our current branding has been around for a long time; it’s served us well, and lots of customers are kind enough to tell us they love it too.
But over time, we noticed that there were a few bits that weren’t designed for use in modern digital environments. We want customers to have the best possible experience interacting with the brand, so we decided last year it was time to bring it up to date.
We did some of the work ourselves, and had some amazing partners to help us with the rest. (A big thank you to Jones Knowles Ritchie, St Luke’s, Space Doctors, Ipsos and Kindling.) The result, we think, is the most digital, flexible and accessible version yet of the Ocado brand. We hope you like it as much as we do.
COLOUR
To start with, we have a juicy new brand colour. May we introduce you to Grape. Like all our previous colours, our new brand colour is inspired by fresh fruit and vegetables, and it fulfils two very important needs.
Firstly, it works wonderfully in digital. Accessibility is the practice of making your website and comms usable by as many people as possible. The high level of colour contrast between Grape and white means our site and apps do a better job than ever in achieving that.
Secondly, Grape gives our brand a distinctive, ownable identity. Green is widely used in grocery branding in the UK, and, well, frankly, we hate to be mistaken for anyone else. Long-time customers will recall that our website was purple for many years, so in many ways we’ve come full circle.
THE SWIRL
The original Ocado identity was developed for a world where customers shopped on desktop computers. Twenty years later, the shape of our swirl was getting a bit lost on smaller screens. As an online service, our swirl has to stand out on our customers’ mobile phones, so we’ve redrawn and tweaked our swirl, so it stays recognisable even when it’s diddy. We’ve also made an animated version for our swirliest moments.
WORDMARK
Our wordmark was sometimes read as ‘ocodo’ because of the single storey ‘a’ in the centre. We’ve switched it for a two-storey version to solve this, while keeping the relaxed nature of the lower-case letters.
TYPEFACE
We commissioned a new custom typeface, the obviously-named “Ocado Sans” (short for ‘sans serif’). It was inspired by the personality of the Ocado swirl, and it’s been built to work beautifully at all sizes, even on small screens.
We’ll be rolling our new identity out slowly over the course of 2021, to enable us to focus on delivering as many groceries to as many homes as possible. Look out for new van designs too (our goal is to top last summer’s wildly popular Percy Pig vans!) and also a fresh new look for our Own Brand packaging. We really hope you love it. Please let us know what you think on Twitter @Ocado.