Northwind
Logistics
2026
Rebranding a 40-year-old logistics giant for the next forty.
Four decades of freight, eleven sub-brands and no way to explain any of it. We gave Northwind one name, one voice and a system its own people could use.
Client
Northwind
Services
Brand identity · Web
Duration
11 weeks
Year
2026
Overview
Northwind moves freight across three continents, but four decades of acquisitions had left it with eleven sub-brands, six logo variants and a sales team that opened every pitch by explaining who they were.
We consolidated the group into a single identity, built the system that carries it, and rebuilt the website so the scale of the operation is the first thing you feel.
−30%
Sales cycle
11
Brands merged
2.4×
Inbound leads
The work
The challenge
Every depot had made its own rules. Signage, invoices, trailer liveries and the customer portal each came from a different decade, and none of them agreed. The brand was not weak so much as unrecoverable — there was nothing left to recognise.
The constraint was operational rather than visual: whatever we made had to be applied by depot managers with a laminator, not by a design studio.
What we did
We ran a two-week audit across the group, then cut eleven brands down to one master and three descriptors. The mark is a compass rose reduced to two strokes, drawn to hold at 8mm on a shipping label and at forty metres on the side of a warehouse.
Around it sits a system deliberately short on options: two typefaces, four colours, one grid and a set of templates that fill themselves in. Fleet livery, dock signage and the quoting portal were all specified before launch.
The outcome
Northwind went to market as one company for the first time since 1998. Sales cycles shortened by nearly a third because the first ten minutes of every call were no longer spent on the org chart, and inbound more than doubled in the first two quarters.
