Edible Apple

Last week, our twitter feed was filled to the brim with folks crying foul over the Gap’s new logo. And yes, there’s no denying that it’s absolutely horrible. In fact, it looks like something you’d come up with while blindly poking around with Photoshop.. for the first time.

Worse yet, the president of Gap North America, Marka Hansen, tried to explain the company’s rationale in changing their arguably iconic logo.

This past Monday, without a lot of fanfare, we introduced a new logo on our gap.com site, and I wanted to take this opportunity to explain our thinking behind this decision.

I’ve been president at Gap brand for the past three years, and I’ve been living and breathing the changes we’ve been making on our journey to make Gap more relevant to our customers.

You’ve seen this evolution through many of our products, such as the 1969 premium denim and the new black pants, and more modern stores in many locations.

The natural step for us on this journey is to see how our logo – one that we’ve had for more than 20 years – should evolve. Our brand and our clothes are changing and rethinking our logo is part of aligning with that.

We want our customers to take notice of Gap and see what it stands for today.

We chose this design as it’s more contemporary and current. It honors our heritage through the blue box while still taking it forward.

Now, given the passionate outpouring from customers that followed, we’ve decided to engage in the dialogue, take their feedback on board and work together as we move ahead and evolve to the next phase of Gap.

From this online dialogue, it’s clear that Gap still has a close connection to our customers, so tapping into this energy is right. We’ve posted a message on the Gap Facebook Page that says we plan to ask people to share their designs with us as well. We welcome the participation we’ve seen so far.

We’ll explain specifics on how everyone can share designs in a few days.

Thank you to everyone who has already shared feedback. I’m excited about continuing the conversation and believe passionately in where we’re taking our brand.

Is this logo really more contemporary? is it really anything? And as for the blue box, it’s out of place and, quite simply, honors nothing at all.

Fail.