The Amazon logo story

As one of the giants in the retail business, it goes without saying that Amazon has quickly carved out a place within influential retail brands. Founded in 1994 in Seattle, Washington, the company was originally called Cadabra, a decision that was quickly changed after noticing it resembled the word “cadaver”. In the beginning, Amazon just sold books online, which allowed them to grow very quickly. They generated $20,000 in revenue a week in the first two months of business. Since their days of only selling books, Amazon has become one of the biggest players in the field of online commerce – as we know it today.

Since the beginning, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, has called on Turner Duckworth to create his logo. Initially, the logo was the letter ‘‘A’’ with a shape of a river inside. This version was replaced in 1997 by a more refined version, with ‘‘amazon.com” accompanied by the slogan “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore’’ in a black font with serif. The font of the logo as we know it today, along with the yellow line, was adopted in 1998. The yellow line started out curving down and now it curves up.

The current logo was introduced in 2000. This logo depicts a smile with the yellow line that starts at the ‘‘A’’ of Amazon and ends with an arrow at ‘‘Z’’. Because of Jeff Bezos’ work, this logo change went fairly quickly as Bezos attended all logo related meetings and approved everything himself. That allowed the company to save money as they eliminated marketing research, approval meetings, and revisions that would have occurred if Bezos hadn’t done everything himself.

Jeff Bezos, being very concerned about costs, did not want to pay for other branding elements or packaging design. Turner Duckworth, therefore, proposed to use only the smile as a design element on the shipping boxes, transforming the boxes into “smile boxes”. This decision made it possible to use the boxes as a marketing vehicle and to ‘‘deliver smiles to doors’’.

The Amazon smile has become as recognizable as the logo itself. This is a good example of why it is import to have a logo that is versatile. This type of strategic planning is important as one must think about how a logo could be used in various ways

References – Freelogodesign.org