carturesti
Rebranding an iconic Romanian national bookstore for today’s audience
Cărturești is not just a bookstore chain — for a generation of Romanians it is a cultural institution, a set of beautiful physical spaces (the most famous, Cărturești Carusel, a landmark in its own right) built on an ethos its own audience named "resistance through culture." That standing was the brand’s greatest asset — and, by 2020, its next challenge. In a bookselling sector under long erosion, hit hard by the pandemic and the fast rise of e-commerce, Cărturești had a deep brick-and-mortar presence and a devoted following, and its brand had lived, remarkably, in its word and its spaces alone. As the audience moved online faster than the word could travel, the opportunity was to give the beloved name a visual voice with the same reach as its verbal one.
Brandient was asked to reconstruct it for a digital age without commercializing what made it loved. That was the strategic tension exactly: Cărturești had to become more visible and more relevant to a younger, online audience while keeping its deliberately non-commercial, cultural character — the very thing a hard sell would have destroyed.
The answer treated the name itself as the identity. Rather than impose a fixed logo on a brand that had lived as pure language, Brandient turned "Cărturești" into a word puzzle — a flexible system of compositions that play with the name and fold in other words for moods, moments and states of mind, in Romanian and English alike. The identity became something to read and re-read, generative rather than static, and it carried naturally into a communication platform built for the channels where a younger audience actually spends its time.
The result gave an icon that had survived on affection alone a visual voice to match its verbal one — expanding Cărturești’s visibility and its pull with a digitally native generation, and turning "resistance through culture" from an ethos into something a customer could see, share and belong to.
The work was recognized with a REBRAND 100 Best of Award (2024).
Client:
Cărturești
Industry:
Retail and Consumer Services
Project type:
Rebranding — Brand Reconstruction
Year:
2020
Services:
Brand Positioning, Brand Platform, Logo and Visual Identity Program, Logo and Visual Identity Program, Communication Design, Retail Design, Digital Design, Communication Design, Packaging Design.
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