Costco is a brand we’re all familiar with. They are known for the value they provide for their customers, their business model and their outstanding leadership culture. 

According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Costco has scored top marks for online shopper customer satisfaction, going head to head with Amazon. Costco continues to thrive and meet the needs of their consumers and its relentless pursuit of a human-first culture.

With retail margins under pressured, increased costs in supply chain management, and growing expectations from customers, Costco has still managed to raise the bar in customer satisfaction among other competitors like Amazon that shared the same values in ‘Customer Obsession’. 

To maintain this stride, Costco needs to continue to identify improvements in its digital positioning to maintain its customer loyalty and world-class customer journeys, so our design team wanted to dive into crafting and conceptualizing an enhanced digital and physical customer experience.

In our rebrand, we focus on refreshing the brand elements, improving UX & extended functionality to their online eCommerce store, and an enhanced pharmacy experience for their prescription refills and mail-order.

It can be argued that the current Costco logo is iconic. It's the only logo the company has ever used and works great for a big box store with thick, large lettering and use of 'classic' blue and red, both shaded in a darker tone. However, with the dawn of a new decade, logos like Costco's are becoming obsolete as more and more retail ventures turn towards online shopping. The current logo does not scale well to smaller sizes and it lacks any kind of icon or recognizable symbol.

Because of these factors, we updated the logo in the way that we did. We updated the red and blue to more modern, brighter shades that look much better on screens. A new colour (light grey) was also added to create more depth. We enhanced the font, using Effra and Rubik, fonts that focus on rounded corners and more symmetry to create a cleaner, softer identity. Keeping the word Costco uppercase in the logo was very important to us to keep ties with the old brand. However, the word wholesale felt very blown out being all caps and so large. By making it smaller and going with no caps we took emphasis off of the word and gave more back to "COSTCO" instead.

We striped away the fragmented design and created a clean, natural flow to the page, breaking down the distinguishing points of the service for the customer. For the mobile app, we created an experience that allows users to easily add new prescriptions, refill their existing prescriptions, and transfer prescriptions from other pharmacies. Users are also able to track the status of their prescriptions. This allows users to have full control over their pharmacy needs right from their mobile devices.

A rebrand isn't just a redesigned logo. An entire brand identity gets changed, which means updating the brand everywhere it traditionally lives. From membership cards, to billboards, to employee lanyards, and especially the signage, we took a stab at creating this new identity from the ground up.

Rebranding an iconic company like Costco is certainly no small feat. This collage of mockups depicts just a small part of what a company would have to redesign as part of a larger rebrand. The process, starting from the logo, to the guideline, to the website, mobile app and everything in between is a constant process of evolution, something that demonstrates how powerful design really is and how a simple brand has the ability to impact countless lives.

In a world where Amazon is positioned to be the ‘Retailer Destroyer’, Costco continues to thrive. Costco is in a unique position to continue to stay nimble and respond quickly to the the constantly changing retail landscape and increased competition.