London Transport Museum retail experience united in rebrand

Located in Covent Garden in the heart of the city, the leading urban transport museum concluded its retail experience had become disjointed over time. It called on British design agency Kit Studio to craft a flexible and unified retail identity and packaging system.

The London Transport Museum’s new identity attempts to highlight the organisation’s rich heritage as a way of embedding a storytelling element within its retail experience. The agency’s research phase saw it visit the Museum Depot in Acton, west London where it drew inspiration from archives of the transport network. Utilising this information, Kit Studio devised the new visual identity system.

Each product – which the museum previously felt spoke to four different audiences – now incorporates unique graphic tiles to tell a unified story of London transport. The packaging, which features iconic London transport colours, also needed to be sustainable. This was achieved by ditching plastic windows and introducing kraft boxes.

Chris Bounds, creative partner at Kit Studio, says, “Working with a brand with such a rich design heritage gave us the opportunity to create a flexible identity that truly represents the story of London transport. From delving into the archives to researching transport journeys, we created a system that is instantly recognisable as London, with an added level of storytelling that encourages customers to explore the packaging.”