Brands First: Mantaro Rebrands With A New Mission
Mantaro puts brands first with a new company rebrand and site redesign, focusing on the future of ecommerce.
We’ve always made it clear we want to partner with brands to help them innovate and grow—and not just acquire them and rest on our laurels.
Putting brands first is in our DNA and what we set out to do.
With so many creative thinkers under one roof, over time we found that parts of our online experience grew in different directions. We didn't want our brand to feel disjointed, so we created a more unified and recognizable system by weaving the new brand identity throughout all facets of Mantaro, from our language to our design, and from our marketing to our support channels.
A New Mantaro
If you were familiar with the first ideation of Mantaro, I'm sure you've noticed a great deal of change. You've probably taken a tour of our new website. It’s got a strong, sleek logo, bright and bold colors, and even some new pages. But this is much more than a pretty website.
This is all part of a new chapter in Mantaro’s story - one that is determined to solidify us in the future of ecommerce.
"I hope this all speaks to the combination of seriousness and fun that we take when working with brands. We’re looking forward to this next chapter and discovering some of the best online brands the world has to offer."
Inspired by Bauhaus
Let’s start with the redesign, a task we did not take lightly. Simple, bold and straightforward is what we were after.
We have always been inspired by the simplicity and strength of the Bauhaus school of design, and wanted to find a way to carry over some core elements into our brand.
Established since 1914, the correspondence between primary colors and shapes was at the heart of artist Wasslly Kandinsky's reflections
and his teaching at the Bauhaus. Creating questionnaires for his students, he asked them to associate the three primary shapes - triangle, square, circle - with the three primary colors - yellow, red and blue.
The most common pairings were: Red Square, Blue Circle, Yellow Triangle.
The square is representative of strength and stability, the circle of freedom and creativity, and the triangle of growth and ascension - all of which are indicative of the Mantaro Brands mission. Collectively, our clients represent a group of passionate brand owners, entrepreneurs, and creators. As such, we want these characteristics to be reflective in our own identity.
The Mantaro Logo
When creating our logo we knew we wanted to incorporate the three primary colors and shapes into our name. As you can imagine, naturally including all six elements into the name M-A-N-T-A-R-O was no easy task. We went through dozens of designs and nothing really grabbed our attention. However, we kept circling back to our initial focus: simplicity.
The logos were well-made and impactful, but they lacked the simplicity we desired.
After carefully researching early Bauhaus design, we landed on the red square as the most crucial. This is not only a quintessential symbol of primitive design, but its representative of a "building block" - which can be taken literal as the start of a physical product, and metaphorical, as a concept or first idea.
To us, this represents everything we love about brands. All it takes is that first, simple idea to start something amazing.
Staying true to ourselves
With this redesign, we set out to retain all the fun, lovable elements that endeared our earliest brands to Mantaro, while creating space for our own brand to grow and connect with even more online businesses. We didn’t want to lose our heritage in the process, so we focused on capturing the essence of what Mantaro has always been.
We champion authenticity, originality, and expressiveness because it's what helps us—and our brands—stand out.