A rising star of Silicon Valley, online grocery shopping business Instacart has grown continuously across the US and Canada since 2012. The pandemic represented a critical inflection point for Instacart - skyrocketing industry growth in online shopping that ushered in a new wave of competition. Instacart needed to quickly evolve its brand and business, and become the leading grocery technology company in North America. As a quickly growing private organization with national reach across over nearly 6,000 CPG brands and more than 1,100 retail banners, it was crucial for the work to flex across all internal and external touch points.

To rally the organization around a powerful North Star, we created the ‘Shop+Savor’ ethos - marrying a commitment to product innovation with the emotion, satisfaction and value the service adds to people’s lives.

Shop+Savor became a transformative tool for leadership to communicate a fresh vision - and guide the branding, marketing, product and overall Instacart experience. This rich duality of Shop+Savor informs every aspect of the brand’s visual system, from the crave-worthy typography to the transformation of its beloved carrot into a dynamic symbol.

The new design system has helped transform the Instacart brand experience, allowing it to stretch, flex and play a bigger role in the lives of internal teams, B2B partners, and consumers. As a result, this exercise accelerated Instacart’s goal for universal consumption, appealing to many segmentations of audiences from “busy achievers” looking to expedite processes to older millennials requiring additional support for everyday needs.

We created the Shop+Savor ethos – marrying a commitment to product innovation with the emotion the service adds to people’s lives. This rich duality guides the brand identity. Foremost we transformed the brand’s beloved carrot into an iconic symbol with a streamlined carrot top that doubles as an arrow, showing you can add anything to your cart, not just food. The dynamic identity is built for motion sparking delight in small product interactions and big campaign sign-offs. The brand typeface has two personalities linked to Shop+Savor: sans optimized for the product and a tasty display that reflects the enjoyment made possible by the service. The system comes to life with a delicious color palette rooted in the carrot’s deep green and vibrant orange, elevated yet approachable photography – think Cheetos on a velvet couch, delightful illustration, and an adventurous voice enticing customers to engage with the brand beyond their transaction.

The new brand identity has seen Instacart through its continued growth this year, to a moment where the brand’s reach now includes 1,100+ retail banners and nearly 6,000 CPG brands. Importantly, Instacart saw a double-digit percentage increase in new site visits in the month after the rebrand launch compared to the month prior, and a 153% increase in online mentions.

Within 12 months of launch, our work was featured in 27 publications - and it was named 2022’s #1 Icon and Logo Evolution by Brand New amongst recognition by the Clio Awards, ADC and One Show Awards, and GD USA.

Instacart CMO Laura Jones said: “The end result is a design system that exceeded all of our expectations. It embodies our brand today – setting us apart as vivid, craveable, and dynamic – and reflects our aspirations for the future."

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