New Work: Saks Fifth Avenue Holiday Windows

Terron Schaefer, group senior vice president for sales and marketing at Saks Fifth Avenue, approached Pentagram to design the holiday window displays at the store’s New York flagship. The idea needed to connect snowflakes and bubbles—motifs which had been used previously—and give the store a way to display its merchandise.

Pentagram’s Harry Pearce and Naresh Ramchandani and their teams came up with a concept that divided the Saks store into two worlds, the subterranean world of the bubble makers and the imaginary world of the snow makers who inhabit the roof of the building. Connecting the two is a curious little girl called Holly who whilst shopping in Saks on Christmas Eve with her parents finds a door which allows her into both worlds. First she visits the cave full of fantastic machines operated by ‘beautiful people in beautiful gowns’. She then rides a bubble produced by the machines, which takes her to the roof where she meets the yetis that make the snow.

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New Work: @ Saks

Saks Fifth Avenue has long been a destination for sophisticated shoppers. The store’s new fall campaign, which launched last week, emphasizes Saks as the place to go for fashion, both at physical locations like its New York flagship, and online. Organized around the tagline “@ Saks”—the store’s Twitter handle—the campaign highlights messages directing shoppers to Saks’ website and social media platforms.

Working with Terron E. Schaefer, Saks’ group senior vice president for sales and marketing, Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and Katie Barcelona have created a stylish identity and series of shopping bags for the campaign. The team developed a signature “@” symbol that evokes the Saks brand identity previously developed by Pentagram—and uses the only piece of punctuation in MoMA’s permanent design collection.

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New Work: Saks Holiday Catalog

Following the success of the inclusion of Conundrums in the 2008 and 2009 Saks holiday catalogs, the team at Saks Fifth Avenue asked Pentagram’s Harry Pearce to come up with another idea to add a bit of fun to this year’s publication.

Given that the iconography of Christmas was defined by the Victorians, Pearce took the Victorian tradition of the rebus as his inspiration and created 76 puzzles to be scattered throughout the catalog. Pearce and his team created an individual image for each puzzle and then provided the images and a style guide to Saks who dropped them into the publication. The cover of the catalog features the “I’m Going to Saks” campaign and store identity designed by Michael Bierut.

Have a go and see if you can solve the puzzles. All 76 rebuses follow, along with images of the puzzles in the catalog. Solutions can be found at the end of this piece.

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New Work: I’m Going to Saks

This week culminates in the shopping free-for-all known as Black Friday, the kickoff to the holiday shopping season that accounts for over half of annual retail revenue. This fall, facing a challenging and somewhat uncertain economic climate, retailers have looked for novel ways to encourage shoppers to visit their stores. For its fall campaign, Saks Fifth Avenue has launched a promotion that declares—in a characteristically straightforward New York manner—“I’m Going to Saks,” and makes the trip to the store an occasion.

Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and Jennifer Kinon worked on the campaign with Terron E. Schaefer, Saks’ group senior vice president for sales and marketing. The team previously developed the store’s spring campaign, which playfully asked shoppers to “Think About…” offerings in various product categories like shoes, jewelry and outerwear. The new campaign is one of action. In advertising and on catalogs, the tagline “I’m Going To” appears in stylish black-and-white arrows pointing the way to the Saks logo, accompanied by declarations like “I’m going to Saks… because some biker chicks have a soft side” and “I’m going to Saks… for everything I want and nothing I need.” These appear alongside photographs by Anders Overgaard of models in motion using all forms of transport: taxi, skateboard, ski lift, hang glider and even crutches. (The fall catalog features supermodel Karolina Kurkova on a Segway; a dog sled appears on the cover of the holiday catalog.) On special shopping bags created for the campaign the arrows appear in a pattern inspired by the identity Pentagram designed for the store in 2007.

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New Work: Saks ‘Think About…’ Campaign

For the past three years—or six seasons, in fashion time—Saks Fifth Avenue has used the theme “Want It!” in the promotional campaigns for its stores. However, in today’s fragile economic climate, this declaration seemed perhaps a bit “too aggressive,” according to Terron Schaefer, Saks’ group senior vice president for marketing and creative. Something more suggestive seemed in order.

So for this spring’s campaign, Saks introduced a new tagline, “Think about…,” a playful suggestion that shoppers consider new ways to play with their personal style via various items found at Saks. The tagline is finished with amusing statements about fashion and style: “Think about…belting a new tunic with your husband’s old tie” and “Think about…making your creative side your outside.” If the tone seems a little familiar, it should: the campaign was inspired by the maxims published by legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland in her “Why Don’t You…” column for Harper’s Bazaar magazine.

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New Work: 3 at Saks Fifth Avenue

This week our longtime client Saks Fifth Avenue reopened its designer collections on a newly renovated third floor. In the works for two years, the 50,000 square foot space is home to 49 collections, including 23 designer shops for brands like Dolce & Gabbana, Chanel, Gucci and Louis Vuitton, as well as a section for emerging designers. The floor has been outfitted with custom furnishings and fixtures by artists and designers including Zaha Hadid and Michele Oka Doner. (Take a video tour with Nina Garcia of Marie Claire and “Project Runway.”)

As part of the reinstallation Pentagram created a brand identity for the floor. The 49 names were rendered in Cyrus Highsmith’s Novia and combined to form a number 3. The Saks staff has adapted the font and identity for installations throughout the store.

Some sample applications of the new identity appear after the jump.

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For the Love of Nonsense

Harry Pearce was called on by Saks Fifth Avenue over the holidays to add a dash of festive cheer to their seasonal catalog. The catalog makes holiday shopping so easy that Saks decided to sprinkle its pages with 108 of Pearce’s Typographic Conundrums, a long-running series of images that use wordplay and typographic invention to present a familiar phrase as a cryptic puzzle that toys with the relationship between typography and meaning.

Saks approached Pentagram after receiving our 2007 holiday greeting, Decipher, a collection of cryptograms designed by Pearce. Each year Pentagram issues a small book as a seasonal greeting to its friends and colleagues, intended to give better value than a simple card by providing an entertaining diversion over the holidays. The idea instantly appealed to Terron Schaefer, Saks’ senior vice president of marketing, who contacted Pentagram to devise a similar style of festive fun for the holiday catalog.

A closer look at Pearce’s Typographic Conundrums and a chance to test your wits against the complete set of 108 after the jump.

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In the Bag

In a front page article about the trend of using shopping bags as portable fashion, the New York Times slips a bag over the head of the “renowned graphic artist” who redesigned the Saks Fifth Avenue packaging. In a comparison with other luxury retailers, Saks comes out on top for giving its formerly “battleship gray bags a sleeker, black-and-white look and more durable feel.” The artist in question, renowned or not, is never identified.

Saks in the TIME Design 100

Our identity for Saks Fifth Avenue has been chosen by TIME magazine for its Style & Design 100.

Saks and the City

Saks in the streets. Photo by Elizabeth Bierut.

Alice Rawsthorn interviews Michael Bierut about the Saks Fifth Avenue identity in T: The New York Times Style Magazine. There are eight million stories in the Naked City; there are 98.14 googol variations in this identity.

“We wanted something that would be immediately identifiable across the street or through the windows of a moving subway car, and that no one would throw away, ” Bierut says. “Blowing up the logo and rearranging the fragments in a million different ways on a grid made the identity much more dramatic.”

Regardless of whether it’s on Fifth Avenue or in the Houston Galleria Mall, Saks is a definitive New York store; the grid refers to the city’s street plan, and the fragments represent the frenzy of its street life. “It’s a metaphor for the larger-than-life experiences you can find on block after block in New York City,” Bierut says. “Though I really don’t expect anyone to notice that. If a Saks customer spontaneously spots the subtext, I’ll send them a gift voucher.”