Amazon

The Amazon global brand transformation. A project 18 months, 15 global markets, and over 50 sub-brands in the making.

Year
2023-2024

Agency
Koto Studio, NYC

Role
Designer

About

As Amazon scaled at extraordinary speed, the brand system sometimes struggled to deliver creative excellence at speed, fragmented across teams, regions, and experiences. Together with Amazon’s in-house brand team, Amazon XCM, we built a new brand system that elevates Amazon’s most iconic assets: a warmer smile, a modernized logo, a flexible new typeface, a unified color palette, and a global architecture designed to move at the pace of Amazon. The result is a more confident, considered, and consistent identity, delivering clarity across every touchpoint and placing brand at the forefront of the company.

THE SYSTEM

We rebuilt Amazon’s core brand assets into a simpler, more coherent system.

The logotype was refined with redrawn letterforms and a more confident smile, forming the basis of a scalable logo architecture. The typography evolved into Ember Modern, a flexible type family supporting 360+ languages and multiple weights for global consistency. The color palette was unified, introducing a single vibrant Smile Orange, a refreshed Prime Blue, and expressive but connected sub-brand hues. Finally, a standardized set of icons replaced countless variations, creating a clear, cohesive toolkit optimized for every scale and platform.

BEFORE & AFTER

Applying the new system

We applied the system by grouping sub-brands into clear cohorts, each with its own tone but unmistakably Amazon—playful for entertainment, trusted for healthcare, fresh for grocery, premium for devices. The parent brand was revitalized with bold type, strong photography, and signature UI, while house brands gained consistency without losing individuality. Prime was elevated as Amazon’s best, Grocery refreshed with appetizing cues, Devices refined with a premium feel, and Healthcare designed to instill clarity and trust.

THE IMPACT

Amazon. The brand that delivers.

In the first six months following launch, the new brand identity system reached billions of customer touchpoints across 15 global markets – uniting over 50 sub brands under one cohesive, expressive, and flexible design language. Record levels of Prime membership growth, increased cross-category engagement, and Amazon’s strongest brand sentiment scores to date underscored the system’s ability to drive both emotional connection and business performance. By streamlining creative production and accelerating implementation across teams, the system proved that thoughtful, scalable design can power a brand as ambitious and diverse as Amazon – everywhere it shows up, and for every customer it serves.