Co-opCopied

By 2016 the 172-year-old Co-op had spent years defined by its full name. Pentagram's 2007 identity spelled out 'The co-operative' and bolted on suffixes such as food, funeralcare and bank. North's founding partner Sean Perkins argued the group had struggled to define itself and already owned a trust mark, a timeless classic, in the clover-leaf logo of the late 1960s, once seen on shops, produce and dividend stamps.

North was asked to work on the identity in 2014. After researching the company's visual history, it pitched reinstating the 1968 mark rather than inventing a new one, and presented it to the board with 'Remember me?' posters on a blue background. Perkins said reprints of the NYCTA and NASA standards manuals helped convince the studio. The project was overseen by head of brand Helen Carroll and group design director Ben Terrett, part of a team that had arrived from the Government Digital Service in 2015.

The original was drawn by hand; North pulled the identity manual from the Manchester archive and gave the letters geometry. Perkins: a symbol and a wordmark in one, impossible to beat and never dated. The Co-op Bank, by then only 20 per cent owned by the group, kept the old branding.

Unveiled at the AGM in May 2016, the logo went onto seven shops, three funeral homes and about 600 own-brand products at once, with over 2,000 stores expected by 2018 and the whole group by May 2019. Terrett wrote on the Co-op's digital blog that rebranding the estate would take years and include staff training, because such projects fail if they are only cosmetic.

The Co-op's digital blog described launch morning at its Old Street food store in Shoreditch, where colleagues liked the new uniforms and customers photographed the signage after staff had worked through the weekend for a 7am start. It said rebranding the whole estate would take several years and argued that user-centred design applies to packaging and stores as much as websites, citing 1985, when the Co-op was first to introduce traffic light food labelling and chose salt over sodium because customers understood it better. Grounding a heritage revival in a history of plain speaking is exactly right; the clover leaf works because the Co-op has always valued clarity.

Creative Review called going back to a near 50-year-old identity an unusual move, and it was. It was also correct. The clover leaf is better drawn, more ownable and more honest than anything a new pitch would have produced, and it put the shared, member-owned idea back at the centre of the brand.