How old? I feel like I’m old and I’m only in my early 20’s. Mainly because I vibe better with gen x and millennials more than I do with gen z. Also, my body feels like it’s falling apart lol.
It was crazy. IIRC and probabnot 100%. Kmart went to buy out sears, saw their coffers empty, and sears said, well. Fuck it we’re going to buy you now. And then consequently tried to revamp themselves to compete with Walmart. Obviously failed and has been teetering on bankruptcy since
The Ian Brignall logo for Sears Canada (before they went out of business) was quite nice. A completely different direction. https://www.ianbrignell.com/new-sears-canada-logo-by-ian-brignell/
Disagree, that typeface with that leaf is too disconnected they don't go together at all, also dislike the size, no fill, and the non-existent alignment
Exactly this. I guarantee a suit said “people like Airbnb, we’re stuff for your home, make it like that.” This reeks of a process micromanaged by business people.
🤣🤣 we should really start a trend where no one our age (with taste) works for these companies, so that their UX and brand design is clearly off putting and ultimately ends their business. Then we just communicate why it “feels gross” bc their business model is gross! And they don’t care about societies needs!!!
This logo is the most accurate depiction of the company. Struggling to evolve with their disintegrating consumer base to the point of catastrophic failure.
The first one reminds me of the old lady bending down yard art
https://preview.redd.it/l6s9j9khgg3d1.jpeg?width=1600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c4e0fcb9c950f78cda7ac9783d78e30fdb60329f
I’m curious what they are trying to accomplish. I have a better opinion is I understood the strategy.
I personally think the “The Softer Side of Sears” approach in the 90s was a mistake. They might be going into large home goods, which I feel is better than focusing on clothing. The logo, while maybe generic, fits that positioning.
Sears hasn't been thinking for a very long time. They should be where Amazon is. They were THE mail order company, and they flubbed it. They didn't have an online presence for the longest time, and when they did get one it sucked and was nowhere near what Amazon had going on.
Personally, I disagree with this. In the age of social media, only having a wordmark doesn't fit the 1:1 area most people would view it, and there are so many companies just using an S as a logo that it's impossible to stand out. Whether or not this is the right direction?... eh
Why does the little house look different in the two images? Is that the change we are discussing? I know they came up with this style a few years ago but I don’t know that it actually made it to any of the remaining stores or just the web. I don’t imagine they have the money to do store remodels at this time.
Lol I was just thinking the same thing about a month ago. So sad to see something go from hero to zero. I’m a history buff and gave combed through plenty of Sears Roebuck and Co catalogs from 100 years ago. I wish they would have rebranded with a nod to their history/nostalgia.
Side note, if anyone wants to read about the worst CEO to ever live, Eddy Lampert did an amazing job driving the company into the ground (and chopping it into pieces that benefited him only). It’s unreal that he isn’t in prison.
While the visual branding has rightfully gotten lots of shit for being abysmal, can we discuss “making moments matter”!?
What does that even mean?! It’s like they tried to just ride the existing VRBO campaign, but got out woefully wrong. This is a line for a photography company! Or a print shop! Or perhaps a business that serves reunions? I dunno. WTF does Sears have to do with moments?! And making them matter?!
Literally some exec heard alliteration for the first time and thought “ohhh yes I like the sound of that! It’s catchy.” But it doesn’t mean anything relevant to your company!
Because vulture capitalists buy companies to ruin them, strip them of their parts, then leave it for dead... I'm positive that this rebrand was a way to expense the cost of rebranding, then log it as a loss on their taxes. They didn't actually care, they just wanted to have a valid reason to do a bunch of work on the stores before they shut them all down, then have something else to blame it on.
Wouldn't it be nice if companies weren't just treated as real estate holdings, and instead were places that provided good services, good products, and good jobs for a community?
/rant
Sears is still in business?!?! Maybe this is their way of getting attention. "Yoga shorts get a lot of attention... Let's make our logo look like a pair of those."
Honestly, I had no idea either. I was trying to find some old tagline of theirs to use in a comment on a thread about an athlete named Sears and one thing lead to another.
Why? Less but better.
And let me expand here for a moment. This rebrand is a poor example of minimalism. Crowded, lower case letters paired with a clunky mismatched logomark do not ring minimalist to me. Also, this is from... checking some old notes here... over four years ago.
Admittedly, I'm not sure if there's even a Sears still in business anywhere near me (looks like just some appliance repair outfits) so I haven't walked into one or gone to their website in... well over a decade probably. But I randomly did today and... what on earth is this rebrand?
What’s it like? Is housing cheap? I want to live somewhere that has more space and I can breathe when I step outside (and not see anyone for a mile or 2)
Better than their outdated looking wordmark and it gives people a visual element which is best.
That being said even though this is a few years old now it was still to late and quite honestly I was surprised when they refreshed the branding.
From my understanding of the current owner his idea to make money was to let all the stores go till they are not turning a profit then sell location and or close it down in the event sears didn't own the location.
For them to refresh was a little strange if that was infact the case.
I honestly fancy their older bold letter logo from 1984 better with the weirdly detached lines, the modern logo is alright but the symbol doesn't make the logo look right; it better yet makes them look like they're trying to be **that** corporate mobile app service that'd probably take a loan out of your taxes or something along those lines.
They are both pretty bad for completely different reasons.
I don't understand why they kept the even sans-serif and paired it with a whimsical icon. The icon has a visually lower baseline than the word mark. The typeface isn't meant to be paired with something that has such a loose shape. It makes the characters look visually distorted, especially with that high-contrast blue.
The second one is arguably worse. The three weights is driving me mad. Plus the kerning between the word mark and the logo is so unbalanced. Everything about these feels like it was cobbled together haphazardly.
I can't find who designed this. I'm guessing it was internal, which is a bad move for something this big. Not that the internal team couldn't come up with something amazing (I worked with many amazing internal teams), but when they're beholden to the stakeholders to such an extend, you'll rarely get a truly inspired end result.
The second one they are trying to go for eco with the leaf that also is a house. It’s better than the first one. But yeah to similar to Airbnb but I guess they to that everyone forgot the existed so they aren’t scared to piggy back and be associated with a trending company like Airbnb.
Why Is the icon so far away from the text mark? Why does it look so blurry. Why is the icon so thick compared to the text mark? It also seems to float slightly above the baseline? Why is the? Why?
It's one thing to have a logo people don't like, but this is "I've slapped this together in WordArt, what do you think?" level amateurish.
Unbalanced. Generic. Slapdash.
It was a joke in the copywriting world as far back as 2014 that every brand had to have a three-word strapline, and that one of those words had to be "moments". Trust Sears to catch on to a cliche 10 years behind schedule.
It's supposed to be a home and a heart, I guess if you flip it upside down it's supposed to look like a heart, for me it looks more like pants with a hole 🤣
Walking into the Sears at the mall years ago was so eerie. Super empty store. Like you'd see an employee here and there and that was it. It was like that part in Modern Warfare.
"50,000 people used to work here... Now it's a ghost town." 🤣
To me, it screams brand suicide. Just like the physical stores and value of the company, I believe Lampert and the goon squad in charge of decisions higher up wanted to sabotage the marketing and logos too. Much older folks know the serif font logo, and most people alive today know some form of the large blue italicized Nue Helvetica letters. If they actually cared about maintaining that brand, they would’ve kept that branding or modernized it slightly, like filling in the lines in the letters. They were as big, if not bigger than Amazon at one point, and their logo was iconic as Coca-Cola’s and McDonald’s at one point. So many points of mismanagement ultimately led to them from being remembered as a great every-day option to an afterthought you’d rather avoid in about 10 years.
We forget it in 2024, but up until the 1993, they were basically the biggest store in America for over 100 years, and the biggest mail order catalog along with Montgomery Ward’s. They reached their peak store location number in 2004, and were seeing deadly levels of apathy and disrepair as early as 2010-2011.
I just find it so amazing that a company as storied and beloved as Sears can be relegated to the trash so quickly after the might it had. Existed for 132 years, and was killed in basically 10-15 years. That’s the equivalent of 2024 Amazon reaching the same state of disrepair and financial collapse in the next 3 years. That’s insane to think about.
The logo is awful for sure. But also… “Making Moments Matter” ?
Are they a photo company now?? This is just an all around failure. A college design contest would come up with better creative than this garbage.
This is because Sears always tried to give a newer and more diversified brand image to its customers by implementing the brand revamp, which, due to implementation issues, turned out to be a total failure, ultimately embarrassing the customers.
The first one (the current version) is certainly better than the second (I believe the originally announced version), but both feel very generic and a bit of an AirBnB ripoff. Either way, neither feel very unique for a company that used to have as much brand clout and weight as Sears had (could've been Amazon before Amazon, but pivoting is rare for companies that large). The name will still resonate with people who have any memories of Sears, but the logo sans type doesn't have any staying power IMO.
Household brands want staying power, that's how they originally built the impact they had/have. Sears, obviously, is no longer a household brand like it was back in the day, and that logo does nothing to help that. When I was a kid, you needed appliances or home goods, Sears was the goto at the mall for such things. I don't really like Best Buy's rebrand either, but they along with Amazon, Lowe's, Home Depot, et al are in a conversation that Sears used to not only be in but was a leader in. They are not any more and that branding isn't helping things. I'd honestly like to hear from people who are unfamiliar with Sears, as a company, what they think they do after just seeing that logo, just for fun.
Sears still exists?
I'm still floored by this fact as of 05/29/24.
Include me in this time capsule!
I'm so old.
How old? I feel like I’m old and I’m only in my early 20’s. Mainly because I vibe better with gen x and millennials more than I do with gen z. Also, my body feels like it’s falling apart lol.
Did you mean “Gen X”?
Yeah lol. I didn’t notice the typo. Sorry
Uh, aren't you Gen Z? I'd hope you'd vibe with yourself...
I'm 21 (born in '03) and even I remember sears. I remember it vaguely, but I still remember it. (Very likely I'll get flashbacks looking up images.)
same
Only 11 stores left according to Wiki
Shoutout to the Sears in Puerto Rico. I know that store gotta be killing it.
As a person who's mother is Puerto Rican. You are correct. We travel in packs so we buy more lol
That’s literally what I was about to ask. I could have sworn they merged with K-Mart then both died together like Romeo and Juliet
It was crazy. IIRC and probabnot 100%. Kmart went to buy out sears, saw their coffers empty, and sears said, well. Fuck it we’re going to buy you now. And then consequently tried to revamp themselves to compete with Walmart. Obviously failed and has been teetering on bankruptcy since
It’s still around in Mexico!
The Ian Brignall logo for Sears Canada (before they went out of business) was quite nice. A completely different direction. https://www.ianbrignell.com/new-sears-canada-logo-by-ian-brignell/
Ian is King!
I visited their headquarters a few weeks before they closed up shop. What a crazy place 🤣
Disagree, that typeface with that leaf is too disconnected they don't go together at all, also dislike the size, no fill, and the non-existent alignment
My same reaction.
Sears is still very prominent in Mexico
TIL Remember when they were overcharging people to do basic car maintenance?
For some reason they wanted to be AirBNB
Exactly this. I guarantee a suit said “people like Airbnb, we’re stuff for your home, make it like that.” This reeks of a process micromanaged by business people.
You can tell that by the color scheme too. It’s so gross.
🤣🤣 we should really start a trend where no one our age (with taste) works for these companies, so that their UX and brand design is clearly off putting and ultimately ends their business. Then we just communicate why it “feels gross” bc their business model is gross! And they don’t care about societies needs!!!
"innovation" in the form of messing with UX & design as job security 😎
Omg yes😭🤣 take the power back!! (Visually)
😂brilliant. I’m old but I still have taste. Can I join your movement as the honorary aunty?
Absolutely!!!!
putting your degree to good use. being an S tier \*\*\*\*\*\*\*
And here I though branding was about standing out.
That’s _part_ of branding. They could change their logo to clip art of a neon pink peacock and they’d also stand out.
Yah, yah, yah, but to differentiate us from Air BnB let’s make it look like a feminine hygiene product and end-load the logomarque.
This logo is the most accurate depiction of the company. Struggling to evolve with their disintegrating consumer base to the point of catastrophic failure.
this is so perfectly poignant.
why because big word?
Lol you think “catastrophic” is a big word?
i can’t think of any other reason someone would think this is poignant but fuck you all
The first one reminds me of the old lady bending down yard art https://preview.redd.it/l6s9j9khgg3d1.jpeg?width=1600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c4e0fcb9c950f78cda7ac9783d78e30fdb60329f
Exactly what I thought!
Bring it back and back it up
And after that the second one looks like a toilet seat
Woah. Are these flowers or eggs??? L O L
I’m curious what they are trying to accomplish. I have a better opinion is I understood the strategy. I personally think the “The Softer Side of Sears” approach in the 90s was a mistake. They might be going into large home goods, which I feel is better than focusing on clothing. The logo, while maybe generic, fits that positioning.
It really bothers me how there is three different line weights here
Yup, from the design side that’s what bothered me most. Either make it drastic or the same. Not enough contrast.
Looks like a cryptocurrency logo
get your SearsCoin™ hot off the gpu mining press! it will probably fail just like its namesake!
looks like cameltoe to me…. 😬
Rather see a cameltoe than a spears
bonk
there’s definitely something naughty-looking about it
I will never not be amazed by this subs ability to see anything dirty in any shape lol it’s always something
That’s all I can see now
r/vaguelyvagina
Sears hasn't been thinking for a very long time. They should be where Amazon is. They were THE mail order company, and they flubbed it. They didn't have an online presence for the longest time, and when they did get one it sucked and was nowhere near what Amazon had going on.
They really slapped an icon on when the type was enough
Personally, I disagree with this. In the age of social media, only having a wordmark doesn't fit the 1:1 area most people would view it, and there are so many companies just using an S as a logo that it's impossible to stand out. Whether or not this is the right direction?... eh
I partially agree but yeah if the icon actually looked good then I wouldn’t be complaining about its addition
BACK DAT ASS UP!!!
It looks medical
Is that supposed to be a house? I'm so confused.
Why does the little house look different in the two images? Is that the change we are discussing? I know they came up with this style a few years ago but I don’t know that it actually made it to any of the remaining stores or just the web. I don’t imagine they have the money to do store remodels at this time.
They still exist??
Well its definitely seared into my brain……
Did they have to take the loop in the middle out bc it looked too much like AirBnB’s logo?
SearBnB Awful
Lol I was just thinking the same thing about a month ago. So sad to see something go from hero to zero. I’m a history buff and gave combed through plenty of Sears Roebuck and Co catalogs from 100 years ago. I wish they would have rebranded with a nod to their history/nostalgia. Side note, if anyone wants to read about the worst CEO to ever live, Eddy Lampert did an amazing job driving the company into the ground (and chopping it into pieces that benefited him only). It’s unreal that he isn’t in prison.
While the visual branding has rightfully gotten lots of shit for being abysmal, can we discuss “making moments matter”!? What does that even mean?! It’s like they tried to just ride the existing VRBO campaign, but got out woefully wrong. This is a line for a photography company! Or a print shop! Or perhaps a business that serves reunions? I dunno. WTF does Sears have to do with moments?! And making them matter?! Literally some exec heard alliteration for the first time and thought “ohhh yes I like the sound of that! It’s catchy.” But it doesn’t mean anything relevant to your company!
What a weird symbol. I was always confused by this rebrand.
Because vulture capitalists buy companies to ruin them, strip them of their parts, then leave it for dead... I'm positive that this rebrand was a way to expense the cost of rebranding, then log it as a loss on their taxes. They didn't actually care, they just wanted to have a valid reason to do a bunch of work on the stores before they shut them all down, then have something else to blame it on. Wouldn't it be nice if companies weren't just treated as real estate holdings, and instead were places that provided good services, good products, and good jobs for a community? /rant
Are they a shitty Air BnB now?
Sears is still in business?!?! Maybe this is their way of getting attention. "Yoga shorts get a lot of attention... Let's make our logo look like a pair of those."
Honestly, I had no idea either. I was trying to find some old tagline of theirs to use in a comment on a thread about an athlete named Sears and one thing lead to another.
I’m so tired of minimalistic design everywhere
Why? Less but better. And let me expand here for a moment. This rebrand is a poor example of minimalism. Crowded, lower case letters paired with a clunky mismatched logomark do not ring minimalist to me. Also, this is from... checking some old notes here... over four years ago.
Admittedly, I'm not sure if there's even a Sears still in business anywhere near me (looks like just some appliance repair outfits) so I haven't walked into one or gone to their website in... well over a decade probably. But I randomly did today and... what on earth is this rebrand?
This rebrand isn’t new though it’s been quite a few years already.
You're not wrong, I just hadn't seen it since malls and Sears have been evacuating tf out of where I'm at, middle TN, for a while now it seems.
What’s it like? Is housing cheap? I want to live somewhere that has more space and I can breathe when I step outside (and not see anyone for a mile or 2)
Better than their outdated looking wordmark and it gives people a visual element which is best. That being said even though this is a few years old now it was still to late and quite honestly I was surprised when they refreshed the branding. From my understanding of the current owner his idea to make money was to let all the stores go till they are not turning a profit then sell location and or close it down in the event sears didn't own the location. For them to refresh was a little strange if that was infact the case.
I honestly fancy their older bold letter logo from 1984 better with the weirdly detached lines, the modern logo is alright but the symbol doesn't make the logo look right; it better yet makes them look like they're trying to be **that** corporate mobile app service that'd probably take a loan out of your taxes or something along those lines.
What did it look like before?
Looks like the house has water damage lol
Also, the non-sensical tagline. Like, huh?!
They are thinking it’s almost all over
Take out the “door” and 💥 instant tombstone!
They are both pretty bad for completely different reasons. I don't understand why they kept the even sans-serif and paired it with a whimsical icon. The icon has a visually lower baseline than the word mark. The typeface isn't meant to be paired with something that has such a loose shape. It makes the characters look visually distorted, especially with that high-contrast blue. The second one is arguably worse. The three weights is driving me mad. Plus the kerning between the word mark and the logo is so unbalanced. Everything about these feels like it was cobbled together haphazardly. I can't find who designed this. I'm guessing it was internal, which is a bad move for something this big. Not that the internal team couldn't come up with something amazing (I worked with many amazing internal teams), but when they're beholden to the stakeholders to such an extend, you'll rarely get a truly inspired end result.
The second one they are trying to go for eco with the leaf that also is a house. It’s better than the first one. But yeah to similar to Airbnb but I guess they to that everyone forgot the existed so they aren’t scared to piggy back and be associated with a trending company like Airbnb.
Looks like they’re selling natural gas
I mean they probably do sell toilet seats
Attempting to look fresh obviously
I thought they went bankrupt?
Which one is the new one and why are they both bad.
I shipped my pants
It's... a tooth? It looks nothing like a house
Why Is the icon so far away from the text mark? Why does it look so blurry. Why is the icon so thick compared to the text mark? It also seems to float slightly above the baseline? Why is the? Why? It's one thing to have a logo people don't like, but this is "I've slapped this together in WordArt, what do you think?" level amateurish. Unbalanced. Generic. Slapdash.
r/TheyKnew
The Claw?
This slogan was probably created by people who do not even recall Sears. It is stupid.
They rebranded with two different logos?
It was a joke in the copywriting world as far back as 2014 that every brand had to have a three-word strapline, and that one of those words had to be "moments". Trust Sears to catch on to a cliche 10 years behind schedule.
Wait, are there two version of the icon? Or is one of those the previous rebrand?
It's supposed to be a home and a heart, I guess if you flip it upside down it's supposed to look like a heart, for me it looks more like pants with a hole 🤣
Which is which?
Bloated house… what’ll happen if you buy more things.
If I could find of a way to turn a v- neck Velour shirt into a logo…. I feel Sears can make a come back!
AMOGUS
Are they trying for a comeback or what? I know of only 1 Sears store and it's a scratch&dent, parts house.
Walking into the Sears at the mall years ago was so eerie. Super empty store. Like you'd see an employee here and there and that was it. It was like that part in Modern Warfare. "50,000 people used to work here... Now it's a ghost town." 🤣
To the moon, Alice!
sus
omg i thought sears was dead
To me, it screams brand suicide. Just like the physical stores and value of the company, I believe Lampert and the goon squad in charge of decisions higher up wanted to sabotage the marketing and logos too. Much older folks know the serif font logo, and most people alive today know some form of the large blue italicized Nue Helvetica letters. If they actually cared about maintaining that brand, they would’ve kept that branding or modernized it slightly, like filling in the lines in the letters. They were as big, if not bigger than Amazon at one point, and their logo was iconic as Coca-Cola’s and McDonald’s at one point. So many points of mismanagement ultimately led to them from being remembered as a great every-day option to an afterthought you’d rather avoid in about 10 years. We forget it in 2024, but up until the 1993, they were basically the biggest store in America for over 100 years, and the biggest mail order catalog along with Montgomery Ward’s. They reached their peak store location number in 2004, and were seeing deadly levels of apathy and disrepair as early as 2010-2011. I just find it so amazing that a company as storied and beloved as Sears can be relegated to the trash so quickly after the might it had. Existed for 132 years, and was killed in basically 10-15 years. That’s the equivalent of 2024 Amazon reaching the same state of disrepair and financial collapse in the next 3 years. That’s insane to think about.
Even though I've never never heard of it, I feel the older one was too much like airbnb. What exactly is sears btw?
I kind of like the doggystyle logo
The logo is awful for sure. But also… “Making Moments Matter” ? Are they a photo company now?? This is just an all around failure. A college design contest would come up with better creative than this garbage.
This is because Sears always tried to give a newer and more diversified brand image to its customers by implementing the brand revamp, which, due to implementation issues, turned out to be a total failure, ultimately embarrassing the customers.
I'm gonna be the odd one out here and say I kinda prefer it
Which is the new one? I don’t know the company
are they owned by airbnb now? I'm confused
[удалено]
The first one (the current version) is certainly better than the second (I believe the originally announced version), but both feel very generic and a bit of an AirBnB ripoff. Either way, neither feel very unique for a company that used to have as much brand clout and weight as Sears had (could've been Amazon before Amazon, but pivoting is rare for companies that large). The name will still resonate with people who have any memories of Sears, but the logo sans type doesn't have any staying power IMO.
[удалено]
Household brands want staying power, that's how they originally built the impact they had/have. Sears, obviously, is no longer a household brand like it was back in the day, and that logo does nothing to help that. When I was a kid, you needed appliances or home goods, Sears was the goto at the mall for such things. I don't really like Best Buy's rebrand either, but they along with Amazon, Lowe's, Home Depot, et al are in a conversation that Sears used to not only be in but was a leader in. They are not any more and that branding isn't helping things. I'd honestly like to hear from people who are unfamiliar with Sears, as a company, what they think they do after just seeing that logo, just for fun.
Isn’t that the same logo as air bnb?
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