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In 2023 Careem rolled out what Campaign Middle East called the most significant rebrand since it launched ten years earlier. The trigger was the business: Careem had moved from a ride-hailing platform to an everything app, with services such as Careem Food, Careem Quik, Careem Pay and the Careem Plus subscription under one umbrella.

Careem's own account of its brand history explains what was kept. In 2012 the logo was simple and literal. Months later it gained an icon derived from the letter C that could stand apart from the name, and by 2016 the company introduced the wink and Careem green. The new system keeps both, while, as Campaign put it, expanding them so they have the breadth to communicate a growing list of categories and services.

The more unusual story is who did the work. Campaign reported that management decided to build in-house creative and design capabilities, and that while the creative studio collaborated with an outside agency at the start, Careem built its own team in parallel to take full ownership of the launch. The rollout began in the app, the main touchpoint, before moving to the offline world of delivery riders, known inside the company as captains, with their uniforms and boxes.

This is the right way to rebrand a super app. The green and the wink are the two things customers recognise, and throwing them away would have been vanity. What needed to change was the architecture, so that a cleaning service and a payment product can look like siblings without looking identical.

Careem's blog told the brand's history in stages. At launch in 2012 the priority was simply to inform; within months it added a C icon usable apart from the name; by 2016 Careem had become common jargon for booking a ride. It then became the Middle East's first homegrown unicorn and was acquired by Uber, serving customers and Captains from Morocco to Pakistan, before setting out to build the region's first everything app. Telling a rebrand as a sequence of jobs the logo had to do is the clearest framing here: inform, then distinguish, now hold a house of services together.

Bringing the work in-house is the long-term bet. An everything app launches new services constantly, and a brand system is only as good as the team maintaining it week after week.