One of the oldest and largest retail platforms in Indonesia, with 155 stores in 81 cities across the country as well as online and app shopping channels.
Matahari, a truly national brand, is known for making fashion accessible to all Indonesians by providing a wide range of merchandise at low prices and communicating it via their pay-off line ‘Pay less, Feel Good.’
As the business evolved its offerings and strategy, it gradually moved out of alignment with its public-facing appearance and seemed dated within the surrounding market space.
Over a period of 6 months, we evolved the Matahari brand across multiple channels to align with its new business initiatives and signal to the public the improved product and service offerings.
The challenge was to refresh and modernise the brand while remaining as true as possible to the existing mark.
Hundreds of emblem variations, coupled with the subtlest of font tweaks landed a unanimous winner. An updated emblem, optimised for digital platforms and an all lowercase logotype, that resounds approachability and youth.
Landing the logo was just the tip of the iceberg. The deep dive task now was to apply the updated brand to a multitude of tangible and digital, customer facing and internal touchpoints.
A hierarchy of launch and standard operational messaging was developed based on a set of strategic outcomes.
We leveraged the cultural understanding of the “friendliest people ever” local team in developing our key launch messaging and translations into Bahasa, the national language. Setting up multiple online shared asset platforms and Whatsapp groups increased efficiency and was crucial in meeting the launch deadline.
Patterns, formulated from the emblem, were developed as a visual brand language, as it references the loved and locally produced Batik garments.
Beyond the launch elements, we had to make sure a multitude of other touchpoints were in place, for both during and post-launch operations. We’re talking shopping bags to shipping bags, gift cards to rewards cards, you get the picture.
Parallel to developing the individual elements, an all-inclusive brand guidelines document was developed, including brand strategy, rules, layouts and sample applications.
Working with such a humble, dedicated and hard-working group of people in the local team, made this brand update and launch a truly fantastic and rewarding experience for us. It would be our honour to do the next update.
