JCPenney New Logo February 2011 - Fashion Company Profile

Company Profile

The February 2011 announcement is kept whole on this single page beside the current snapshot: the competition, the student winner, and the red-box design built so the standalone jcp could work on its own. JCPenney's branding has moved on since 2011, and the company itself is now part of Catalyst Brands (formed January 2025); for the retailer profile, see the JCPenney company profile linked from this page. As a retailer itself, JCPenney carries no shop box here.

The announcement balances change against continuity, and both halves are quoted in the filing. The new mark signifies the company's great progress in creating a more exciting and relevant shopping experience; at the same time it honors the company's iconic roots as an affordable shopping destination relied on by the more than half of America's families that shop jcpenney each year. The logo arrived after a series of growth initiatives positioning jcpenney as a style authority, and the release names them: Sephora inside jcpenney, the European fast-fashion brand MNG by Mango, Call It Spring by The Aldo Group, and the exclusive launch of Liz Claiborne and Claiborne apparel and home merchandise.

An Open Competition and a Student Winner

How the design was chosen is the heart of this page. Jcpenney sought submissions that would reflect a wide range of perspectives, and the field was deliberately mixed: the company's own associates, several design agencies, and two art schools - the University of Cincinnati and the Rhode Island School of Design - which collectively submitted over 200 designs for consideration. A national retailer with more than a thousand stores opened its identity to a design contest, and then chose a student's work over the agencies'.

The winning design was provided by Luke Langhus, a third-year graphic design student at the University of Cincinnati. His idea, as the release tells it, was to reintroduce jcpenney's iconic red box - a symbol he had long associated with the national retailer. Rather than inventing a new symbol, the winner reached back into the brand's own visual memory and rebuilt the mark around the box. The historical record page shows both marks, the new logo at the top and the older logo below it, so the reader can judge the evolution directly - and it asks the question outright: do you like the new logo, and do you think they should have changed it?

The Red Box and the Standalone jcp

The design's cleverest feature is its versatility. Langhus developed a logo that preserves the company's namesake in full, but that can be modified to showcase the jcp independently - his intent, the release says, being to ensure it would resonate with constantly-connected digital consumers who often use abbreviations. In 2011 that was a forward-looking brief: the same identity had to work on a storefront, a catalog cover and a phone screen, and the solution was a full name for print and a three-letter shorthand for digital life, both carried by the red box.

The page closes with the same spelling note its sibling profile carries, and on a logo page it matters doubly: it is not spelled JCPennies, there is technically no space after the JC, and the proper method is JCPenney, not JC Penney. A redesign that shortens the name to jcp makes the correct full form worth recording exactly. For the company behind the mark - the stores, the catalog, the Long-Range Plan and the history from 1902 - the retailer profile in this letter is the companion record; this page keeps the identity story on its own, dated February 2011, exactly as it was announced.