Amazon was founded 30 years ago with a mission to unlock the power of the internet for commerce. Since then, the company has infiltrated daily life for billions of people around the world, delivering products, services and content to customers in nearly every imaginable category.

Unsurprisingly, the brand’s rapid growth over the last three decades had resulted in a fragmented brand experience that was increasingly hard to execute operationally, with a need for much greater simplicity and consistency.

Tasked with overhauling Amazon’s brand, Koto’s goal was to create a unified, modernised system that moves at the speed of the business itself. Building on the brand strategy work carried out by Sylvain, the global brand transformation spans 15 global markets, over 50 sub-brands and billions of daily touchpoints.

The rebrand aims to elevate Amazon’s most iconic assets, starting with the first update to its logo in over 20 years. The refresh places greater emphasis not on the A-Z arrow but on the smile metaphor, reflecting the brand’s mission to make its customers’ lives easier.

Building on the refined symbol, Koto set about creating a consistent, manageable logo system to deploy across Amazon’s ecosystem. Historically, new sub-brands were often spun up quickly and independently by the business, leading to an inconsistent overall identity. To address this, the team redrew the original letterforms, while internally the various sub-brands were organised into like-minded ‘cohorts’.

A new custom alphabet, Amazon Logo Sans, is fundamental to providing a unified, scalable system for every sub-brand. Working with type foundry NaN, Koto also evolved Amazon’s typeface Ember – originally built for Kindle screens – into Ember Modern, a font designed for high-impact marketing moments as well as more functional digital experiences.

Given that Amazon ships to markets all over the world, the typeface also needed to work across an array of different cultures, scripts and contexts. The result is a singular typographic system that includes support for 364 languages, including English, Japanese, Latin, Cyrillic and many more.

In the same vein, a more comprehensive iconography system was introduced to bring greater order to Amazon’s vast brand ecosystem. Born out of the smile mark and Ember Modern, the icons are flexible enough to work across different sub-brands as well as being optimised for every size and touchpoint – from apps to billboards.

Using colour in a more impactful way was another central component of Koto’s work. The studio unified the many oranges previously in use across the brand, introducing a more dialled up Smile Orange brand colour. Each Amazon sub-brand also incorporates a more expressive colour palette, including Prime’s saturated, digital-first blue and Amazon Grocery’s vibrant green.

A verbal identity packed with more personality, hallmark UI elements and brand photography by Mari Juliano also form vital components of the studio’s wider work across Amazon’s category-spanning sub-brands – from its Alexa devices through to its Healthcare business.

The new brand identity system has already rolled out across packaging, vans, uniforms, digital screens and even race cars, across the company’s global markets.

In the first six months following the launch, Amazon has seen record levels of Prime membership growth, increased cross-category engagement and its strongest brand sentiment scores to date.

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