Farmacia Tei
Everything under one roof — the Tei masterbrand for Romania’s health-and-beauty retail phenomenon
Tei is one of Romanian retail’s great entrepreneurial stories. In 1992, Roxana Maftei — then twenty-five — took over a single neighborhood pharmacy on Bucharest’s Lacul Tei boulevard, and named the business after the quarter. Three decades on, Tei had grown into the pioneer — and the market leader — of a category it effectively created in Romania: the health-and-beauty large-space, multi-format, one-stop store. By 2023 it operated twelve locations in Bucharest and Constanța with more than 1,200 employees, had launched the BebeTei megastore and its online stores, and — following a 2022 private-capital investment from Pavăl Holding, the vehicle of Dedeman’s founding family — was preparing to expand across the country.
Growth had outrun the brand. The business traded under two strong but separately grown manifestations, Farmacia Tei and BebeTei, with new formats on the horizon; the brand’s architecture, not its fame, was the bottleneck. Brandient’s audit found the equity already formed, in the public’s own words: "human prices, for every pocket," helpful and empathetic staff, shelves where "you always find what you’re looking for." It also framed the risk of scale plainly: the bigger the retail space, the more acutely the brand must speak — a silent brand makes a big store feel like a warehouse.
The architecture decision came before any design. Brandient’s recommendation made Tei itself the masterbrand — the corporate brand and the retail brand in one — with the formats named as generic descriptors under it: Farmacia Tei, Bebe Tei, Zoo Tei, Drogheria Tei. One name to carry the equity; a nomenclature with room built in for every format to come; and a visual architecture that is deliberately near-monolithic — every manifestation carries the masterbrand mark, so awareness built anywhere compounds everywhere.
The positioning territory sits at the intersection of the two relationships the stores actually hold with their customers: the pharmacy’s — specialist, intimate, conversational — and the store’s — exploration, discovery, offers, delight. Its promises: one-stop shopping, variety, availability, accessibility, and warm human service. The brand line compresses all of it into six words that every sub-brand shares: Tei. Și ce trebuie, și ce vrei. — "Tei. What you need, and what you want."
The identity was developed under the concept everything under one roof. The new wordmark’s exaggerated "T" spreads its arms into a literal roof, sheltering the letters beneath it — and, at its left, each format’s symbol: the pharmacy cross, the pram, the paw, the checkmark. The roof reads as the promise reads: shelter from worries and from illness, and at the same time communion, community, access, destination. Every sub-brand logo is composed by the same algorithm — the Tei mark and the format symbol always in Tei Green, the format name in a color of its own: violet for Bebe, fuchsia for Zoo, turquoise for Drogheria — while Farmacia Tei alone keeps the green, because it generated the business and holds the equity; Tei Green itself is the color inherited from the founding pharmacy brand. The mark is deliberately monochrome-capable — built to reproduce economically from one-color print to engraved signage — and even the typography keeps the brand’s accessibility promise: open-source faces, free to use everywhere. A comprehensive visual-identity guide was delivered as the system’s constitution.
Tei executed. The new identity rolled out across storefronts, interiors, e-commerce, and communication — the green facades now carry the roof-mark and the brand line — and the expansion the architecture was built for is underway: entries announced and staffed in Focșani, Galați, and Timișoara, mall stores announced for Brașov and Craiova, record revenues reported — and a nomenclature standing ready for every format to come.
Client:
Farmacia Tei (Tei group) · Paval Holding
Industry:
Retail and Consumer Services
Project type:
Rebranding — Brand Reconstruction
Date:
2023
Brand Finance:
Romania 50 (2026): #27
Services:
Brand Audit · Brand Positioning · Brand and Portfolio Architecture · Brand Name, Narratives and Voice · Logo and Visual Identity Program · Brand Guidelines
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