Despite doomsayer predictions, brick-and-mortar bookstores’ demise hasn’t come. In fact, local bookstores—and revived big-brand chains—are luring customers in with new incentives, merch, and cultivated communities. The Rising Popularity of Brick-and-Mortar…

Major retailers like Target, Walmart and Aldi have recently announced redesigns of their private-label brands. The recent string of rebrands signals new investment in how these products are perceived. As more consumers embrace store brands, many major retailers have decided they need to improve the way they look. In 2024, Target introduced new, colorful packaging for its Up&up brand designed to make it easy to identify products as customers shop with large product names. Last year, Aldi began a refresh of its branding and packaging to put its logo on every private-label product in the store, and to bring consistent fonts and graphic design to all Aldi-branded products. In April, Walmart announced a redesign of its Great Value brand, its first full brand refresh in more than a decade. The refresh aimed to provide consistent placement of nutritional information, clearer visual cues to help customers pick the correct items and a modernized look.

It’s been a seven-decade-long run, but Ikea is formally saying goodbye to its printed catalog. The decision was announced Monday (Dec. 7) as the Ikea brand continues to shift itself to digital, according to published reports. At a peak four years ago, Ikea distributed 200 million catalogs worldwide in 32 languages. The BBC once reported that the Ikea catalog was the world’s largest publication, with more copies printed than either the Bible or the Quran. Of course, it’s not surprising that a retailer looking to focus on digital is exiting print. The same trend has been underway for the past decade or so in mass-market publishing. Print runs of books, newspapers and magazines have been more or less continuously on the decline as consumer preference for digitized content grows in the mobile era. What’s perhaps eye-catching in Ikea’s case and for the world of catalog publishing in general is how inconsistent that pullback actually seems to be when one looks at retail. For every Ikea that pulls out of the printed-catalog business, there seems to be a digital brand that’s pushing forward with a new physical catalog all its own. click read more below for the full article