A short-lived logo
On the 5th of November 1909 the first UK Woolworths branch opened in Liverpool.
Woolies was planning on celebrating its 100 year milestone and had issued a poster for all staff rooms. Interestingly, instead of adapting the logo they had used for almost a quarter of a century (see below),
they, instead, created a brand new lowercase one.
The last change of logo was in 1985, and maybe they thought a fresh new look on the chain’s centenary would be a good idea.
I suspect that 2009 would have seen the roll-out of the new lower case branding on shop-fronts.
I don’t particularly like it or dislike it. It does seem rather bland though.
To show you how it would have been used on printed material, Chris Allen has kindly allowed me to show you some staff discount vouchers that were issued in November 2008. The new logo is clearly on display.
I noticed this too, however, the new logo was on their website just before it went down as I noticed when I was ordering gifts online (Just on the main page though).
I see. I suppose the website was the easiest and cheapest to swap to the new logo first.
Staff uniforms would have been relatively quick and easy too. The only visible branding on them was on name badges.
Would like to have seen how the new look would have been rolled out to store fronts, advertising and product packaging. Such a shame.
I bet there are draft designs hanging around somewhere that’ll never see the light of day*.
* If anyone reading this has them, please email me!
Some of the work polo tops had a little red tab at the side with the old woolworths logo, so did the shirts. I just thought it was worth a mention, lol. I was looking forward to the promotional 100th birthday t-shirts,they would have been ace =)
I must admit I felt a bit sad seeing the poster for the 100th birthday surprise, ours was on the noticeboard outside the staffroom. It made me feel a little disheartened over the past few weeks before closing, just because there wasn’t a lot we could do about it =(