Transforming an international retail franchise into a market-leading domestic brand.
Overcoming brand disconnects to build a credible, high-performing retail identity.
The project began as an adaptation of KIKA, a well-known Austrian chain of furniture and household goods supermarkets with an established footprint across Europe. While the business model brought a unique, high-quality product mix to the local market, the existing brand architecture faced critical perception hurdles with local consumers.
Despite offering higher-quality products at a slightly elevated price point compared to competitors like IKEA, KIKA’s visual style and phonetics felt low-cost and disconnected from its premium positioning. Consumers frequently questioned the brand's European origins and reliability. Recognizing these barriers, leadership tasked Mildberry with developing a completely new, high-equity brand identity capable of scaling across existing mega-stores without losing established customer loyalty.
Creating a confident brand platform, European-sounding name, and cohesive retail identity.
Mildberry re-engineered the retail brand from the ground up, establishing a strategy rooted in trust, quality, and emotional comfort.
We developed the name "Hoff"—a crisp, confident neologism designed to resonate with local consumer preferences. The phonetics immediately communicate solid European engineering and quality, instantly resolving the credibility gap of the original brand.
To ensure a smooth transition for existing shoppers across physical stores, we preserved the brand’s vibrant scarlet color while introducing warmer, more emotionally engaging design elements. We established the exclamation mark as the central visual signature, embedding it directly into the logo and across all marketing materials.
We developed a comprehensive design system spanning in-store navigation and promotional materials, ensuring a seamless visual experience across large-format supermarkets.
A highly successful store-wide rebrand that elevated consumer perception and drove national expansion.
The transition from KIKA to Hoff was executed smoothly across the entire retail network. The new identity immediately resonated with consumers, cementing the chain's reputation for European reliability, modern style, and accessible quality.
The rebrand also created a powerful internal shift, significantly boosting employee pride, brand advocacy, and corporate culture. Today, Hoff stands as a dominant retail power, continuing its rapid expansion and store rollouts under the transformed identity.
