MILAN – Transform has for the past 10 years arranged The Transform Awards. They started with Europe as a region 10 years ago, and has over the years added more regions such as Middle East & Africa, Asia Pacific, North America, and this year added The Nordics. Waynes, which entered the category Best brand identity in the food and beverage sector, managed to get enough points to reach the no 1 position in the category.
The Jury of The Transform Awards said: “With declining footfall, decreased standout on the high street and a new owner in place, Swedish coffee shop chain Waynes needed to address its brand for the first time in 25 years. Waynes first updated its brand positioning to stand for accessibility, value and organic and sustainable food choices.
The visual identity was rebuilt from the ground up. Eschewing the dark colours and staid colour palette of the past, Waynes introduced a friendly blue primary colour complemented by light woods and a cheerful, open store design. The logo was redeveloped to move away from coffee-industry clichés and establish it as a quality mark. Fun illustrations round out the playful, contemporary new identity. Judges loved this. One called it “well-researched, planned and executed.” Others praised the friendly, distinctive and inherently Swedish style built into the new brand.”
Carina Dyberg, Head of Marketing and Communications at Waynes, talks about the win and the work behind the achievement
It is amazing to see that so many months of hard work can result in this kind of appraisal! We started our whole rebranding journey with a market research in the fall of 2018, where the results led us all the way to a new brand identity and coffee shop concept a bit more than a year later!
This is a result of courage as well as involving the whole company and working in a close cooperation with very talented specialists from different disciplines. Together we could create a brand identity and a coffee shop concept where all different parts align and really exudes what we want to share. We chose to hand pick the specialists we needed, which gave us great flexibility, a very close and personal cooperation and a serious and never questioned commitment. And also, this work created the opportunity for us to develop our business and create new solutions to be able to meet an everchanging world with a change in customer behaviour and increased digitalization.
A concept that attracts multiple stakeholders
Ever since the launch of the new brand identity and coffee shop concept in February 2020, Waynes has despite the pandemic, been able to open six new coffee shops and has still three more to go before the end of the year.
Mats Hörnell, CEO at Waynes, talks about the advantages with the new concept:
We have definitely seen an increase in interest for Waynes after launching the new concept. We are getting more proposals from landlords and new potential franchisees connect with us and show interest in opening their own Waynes – despite we’re in the middle of a pandemic. It’s absolutely necessary for us to build an identity and a concept that attracts all our stakeholders, not only our guests but also landlords and potential franchisees, which we now can see is what we have done.
Our next step, besides continuing to open new coffee shops in Sweden and transforming the existing ones into the new concept, is to take the new identity and concept to our other nine markets worldwide. I am really looking forward to being able to spread Waynes organic coffee and Scandinavian fika moments to all our guests in the world.
