award of merit
masha@transportnewyork.com
Walmart has long set the standard for delivering quality at everyday low prices, and their multi-billion-dollar flagship activewear brand, Athletic Works, is no exception. But a reinvented product lineup designed to help customers choose Athletic Works with pride needed a rebrand to match. Our guiding principle? Not every move is big, but every move matters.
Grounded in how people want to move today (and how they want to feel while doing it), we combined welcoming language, sleek, minimalist design elements, and confident photography into a brand world that punches above its weight class—and that competes harder than ever before. The result is an identity and design system ready to inject packaging, apparel, footwear and gear with approachable energy.
To lend a sense of industry and utility, we began with a logo that subtly references stenciled “Property of” typography. The brand’s palette had to work for the whole family—nothing too adult for the playground, too young for the 5K, too femme for gym bros or too masculine for lattes with your girls. So we leaned into the versatility of black, white and gray, with an electric green jolt of energy. We transformed the photographic approach, bringing it into the modern age.
But the real craft came in applying the foundational identity to the thousands of SKUs that make up Athletic Works. From a custom icon system to information hierarchies for countless pack form factors, we built a system that would stay true as it flexed for every merchandising context and traveled through the hands of Walmart’s countless domestic and international partners. With a rollout that’s only a couple months underway, the new Athletic Works is primed to deliver both a new kind of customer and newfound joy for existing fans.
