Lawry's Logo, 1959
Saul Bass & Saul Bass & Associates' 1959 logo for Lawry's.
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American corporation Lawry's Foods began in 1938 as Lawry's The Prime Rib Restaurant. By the late 1950's, despite being a small, family-owned business, Lawry’s had found success with its roast beef, prepared using a proprietary aromatic blend of salt, herbs and spices. It later sold this seasoning pre-packaged to restaurant customers and began to compete with the giants of the food industry as it made its way on to the supermarket shelves.
As the product business gained market traction the need to establish a strong, contemporary logo to better identify Lawry’s basic salt product amongst bigger brands (with more lines) became apparent. A set of criteria was set out for its design. The new logo would need to; work as a banner under which Lawry’s could launch further products into national and international markets; work well primarily across packaging; link all Lawry's products to make their presence in supermarkets more important to consumers and store buyers; and serve as a ‘wedge’ to gain further distribution.
New York-based Saul Bass & Associates were initially invited to work on the structural design of a new Lawry’ dressings bottle in 1958. However, they became an ‘influential factor’ in the decision to also develop a new logo, and went on to develop a comprehensive corporate identity program.
Saul Bass & Associates' early studies pointed towards brand equity existing within the red-orange and dark brown colour scheme which had been a key part of the original Lawry’s restaurant identity. It was decided that this should be retained whilst an entirely new and standalone logo be developed.
With the need to compete on supermarket shelves against ‘well-entrenched’ and heavily-advertised major brands the new logo would be required to have a ‘visual boldness’ and ‘singularity’, and convey a sense of quality on a ‘gourmet level’. Further, the ‘memory-recall’ attributes of the logo would need to be maximised so that it would instantly identify and endorse future Lawry's products that would use a diverse range of physical containers.
The initial ‘L’ surfaced as a strong initial candidate. Hundreds of variations of this were explored. These ranged from slight modifications of the ‘Old English’ swash capital from the previous logotype to completely modern letterforms.
Concepts were tested in various simulated use-cases, which included shop aisle mock-ups. From this, the strongest most versatile logo began to take form. Additional refinements eventually produced the final spiral top design.
The result was a simple yet bold for the time, which stood out from the competition. What later be called the ‘fanciful L’ retained some of the traditional chisel-edge calligraphic qualities of the earlier logotype in the diagonal ending of the descender as it met the bold squared-off bottom of the horizontal stroke. The near-even weighted spiral serif brought the viewer back to twentieth century, creating a continuity between old and new, adding an elegant gourmet flourish.
The various configurations of the logo and logotype provided an ample range of combinations to suit different purposes and spatial requirements. This provided Lawry’s with far more flexibility than it had before. This would be particularly important as the corporation expanded into new product lines with a far more diverse set of context and considerations, from wide bodied dressing bottle to slim seasoning cylinders. For example, a slightly shorter logo, and a shorter version without the chisel cut, were created for situations where vertical height was restrictive.
In application, the logo and logotype worked together in a variety of modular arrangements to afford a flexibility, interest and continuity across packaging, signage and other areas of corporate activities.
Lawry's appearance in the supermarket, following an initial roll-out of eleven new lines with a total of forty-five new individual products, all with the new design, collectively and vastly increased the visibility of the brand.
Because advertising budgets for individual items was small or non-existent, the logo reminded people that a new product was from the same company they already knew and trusted. And, as the lines expanded, the expanded Lawry's retail presence gave the impression it was much larger than it was, and worth considering alongside more established and bigger brands.
The strategy worked. From a volume of $5 million in the late 1950's, Lawry's grew to $30 million in the 1970s. By then the main factory in California and branches in Illinois, Toronto and Paris were producing salad dressing, sauces and over 100 different spices and seasoning products which were then exported to more than thirty countries. These were sold to Lipton/Unilever in 1979, then to McCormick & Company in 2008, who retained the logo, and can be seen still in use today, albeit with the addition of some shading and highlights.
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