Brand Bible

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around for a long time, and the Saks leadership likes

that. That’s a good thing. Because of that, they can

commission interior spaces that are progressive and

lively, but that are within the context of a brand that

has real history.

But we were told not to be restrained by that history.

We were invited to come up with anything we

wanted. We started by setting “Saks Fifth Avenue” in

a million dierent typefaces. In Gotham, Helvetica,

Bodoni. What happened—and this is the second

reason we ended up going in the direction we did—

was that these dierent versions all felt “sad” some-

how. It was like taking a name that had real power

and resetting it so that it was representing a store

that could have opened yesterday. It was dismaying

to look at these options. The brand felt denuded—

castrated, almost.

Third, it’s dicult to nd a legitimate new position

that you can own typographically. You take the words

Saks Fifth Avenue, you set it in Helvetica like JCPen-

ney, you set it in Bodoni like Giorgio Armani, you









In the case of Saks, there are three reasons: First, the

brand shepherds were simultaneously trying to capi-

talize on the authority of Saks’ heritage and express

a progressive, forward-looking fashion attitude.

The store on Fifth Avenue really feels like it’s been

26

How to Brand

a department Store



Michael Bierut

Pentagram

Design narratives

from a master storyteller

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267

Shopping bags for

Saks Fifth Avenue

set it in any number of options—you name it, and no

matter what neighborhood you’re trying to move into,

there’s always somebody living there already.





What Saks really wanted was something easily

identiable from across the street—like Tiany’s blue

or the Burberry plaid. Those visual iconographies

are well established, and the only reason they mean

anything is because they’ve been around for a while.

When we started the project, it didn’t seem that Saks

had anything like that.







I remember one meeting where we gathered together

some inspirational imagery. One set featured

examples of mid-century New York School Abstract

Expressionism, which included paintings by Barnett

Newman and Franz Kline that had huge, overscale,

very organic gestures on them. The clients really

liked those and said, “This looks modern, but it has

warmth to it.” At that point, we were still experi-

menting with the logo by setting it in Helvetica and

other variations. We’d revisited the script logo and

someone had magnied it very large on their screen. I

said, “Wait a second; that could be something.”

So then we did a quick cleanup of the existing Saks

script logo, divided it up into smaller squares, and

started shuing those around. We discovered that

some of these images had an abstract power—yet they

weren’t patterns that came from nowhere. They were

all derived from a way of writing the Saks name that

has a sixty-year history. And the designs we created

looked new, and startlingly so. We’d found the ideal

combination of both modernity and tradition, and

it was really thrilling to see that because once you

had these sixty-four squares, you could mix them up

any way you wanted, and the result would always be

compelling. When you do the math, it turns out that

there are more combinations possible than there are

particles in the known universe.







For Saks, we were considering its collection of

fty-plus packages. There are two dierent ways to

contend with a project like that: In one, you make all

the packages part of a monolithic system. Tiany’s

is monolithic, and Massimo’s plan for Saks was

monolithic. Massimo had a men’s and a women’s

package, two dierent colors, and the same hang tag

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