On June 1, 2001, The Australian hardware store Mitre 10 announced it was undertaking “a major repositioning and re-branding exercise to capture the “noughties” consumer and cement its position at the top of the lucrative home improvement market.”
In the words of Mitre10’s managing director Frank Whitford, ‘The brand logo has been given a new look, with the traditional blue, orange and yellow colour scheme being ditched.’ The interesting sample of lettering design, also ended up on the cutting room floor too.
It is not unusual for established clients to ditch, or simplify, their brands that enjoyed an expression that may be perceived to date it. Many modern brands suffer from having any sense of a past, and as a result of this design sanitation, many contemporary brands have very few visual cues that make it unique from other brands.
Apart from the odd mention of the Mitre10 brand, there is no mention of the logo’s or brand’s designers. It is all too common in an age of mergers and acquisitions, that design companies evolve into bigger and better things, and the material that made the studio’s worth noticing, the work, has got lost in a rush of archiving, or the skip bin.
This relic sits innocently across the road from Pearl Café in Richmond. I love the fading zany colour palette, I also like the playful custom type treatment – The M that looks like a mitre, the crashing dot on the i, the angry barbed e, and the severe angle of the stencil effect. It’s chunky, awkward, and distinctive. Yum.
If a reader out there can identify the designer of Mitre10 circa 1990s we would be happy to credit them for their work.
