Seamless

8: Ordeal

Some animals adapt when their external environment changes. Others lose their natural habitat, go into decline and die.

Moods had waxed and waned. At times, for example, Mum would vehemently oppose the idea of a new brand as the symbol of the Georg Sörman 100 strategy. She would say that Georg Sörman's neon sign and neon logo of the man with the walking stick was iconic (see figure 8.1). Indeed, it had been voted the inaugural ‘sign of the year' in 1998 when Stockholm was the EU's culture capital, and a replica had been turned into the Oscar of Swedish design awards by becoming the actual prize for subsequent winners for a decade (which had ended in 2008, mind you). The neon sign even had its own Wikipedia listing (see sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sörman-skylten; use Google if you'd like to translate the page into English). I would counter that the brand was known as a shop for geriatrics, and that today's sixty year olds are more like forty year olds. I would also point out that the universal iconography of a geriatric (used on buses and trains, for example) is a man with a walking stick, not dissimilar to our logo, and that if we were to use a man with a walking stick, the man should at least have a spring in his step, like the one used in the Johnnie Walker logo (see figure 8.1, overleaf).

Figure 8.1: the old logo and the former brand perception

The business was ...