Steiff

In May 2022, the Hamburg agency Peter Schmidt Group introduced a new visual identity for Steiff, timed to the 120th anniversary of the teddy bear. The strategic groundwork was provided by Batten & Company, whose market research confirmed that the teddy bear was the brand's strongest associative anchor. The redesign codified the Steiff logo architecture for the first time, pairing a slightly straightened wordmark with a dedicated black and white teddy bear head whose left ear carries a small white circle as a direct reference to the 1904 Knopf im Ohr trademark. A pastel colour palette and the typefaces Bodoni and Work Sans completed the system.

Steiff has never publicly documented a single creation date for the wordmark used before 2022. The Steiff lettering first appeared on the Knopf im Ohr from 1905 onward, when Franz Steiff replaced the original elephant motif with the company name, and the script passed through at least four documented iterations across the twentieth century: a cursive Steiff with a downward extended f from 1905 to 1912, a raised lettering treatment from 1912 to 1934, and further refinements through the post war decades. The wordmark in the rectangular ear flag style most audiences recognised was therefore not the work of one identifiable designer or one identifiable year, but a brand mark incrementally updated within the Margarete Steiff GmbH design office across multiple generations.