Condor is evolving into a distinctive and unique vacation airline.
It was 5th April noon, something bright yellow, stripped zoomed passed my vision as I was gazing at the sky, was it a bird? It was a plane. It was the new Condor with bright and fresh striped yellow livery. My instant reaction was – Wow! This is the plane I want to go on, on a vacation. Being cooped up for two years in the house under pandemic restrictions, I am sure most of the tourists and families would have the same thought, and that’s exactly what the makers of this new livery thought too. Condor is a leisure charter airline operating in Germany established in 1995, positioning itself as an airline that carries you away to your dream sunny destinations like Agadir, Morocco, Mykonos, Greece, etc.
Like it or now, the new livery is sure to turn heads and grab attention. Condor’s rebranding came at the exact right time when the world is opening up again and vacation mode is On! With stiff competition in the market and airlines vying for passenger attention, Condor’s game plan seems to have done the trick.
The newer bolder Condor!
The new look with bold strips was inaugurated on 5th April 2022, when the Airbus A321 with bright yellow stripes flew to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. In the upcoming weeks, five more Boeing 757 and Airbus A320/1 aircraft will be repainted, so six aircraft will be flying in the new design in the summer flight schedule. They will mainly fly to Mallorca, Greece, the Canary Islands, and Egypt. The rest will take off in the fall, following their purchase of 16 new A330neo planes.
Condor CEO Ralf Teckentrup, says the branding reflects the airline’s purpose: to “bring holidaymakers to their vacation, where striped towels and parasols are all over.” He says the new branding will not drive an increase in ticket prices, but it has certainly attracted plenty of attention.
The new design was unveiled in Toulouse with the first A330neo, which will take off for Condor in the fall. The first 2-liter aircraft will of course take off with green stripes.
The stripes and the colors
The new liveries come in five colors ranging from sunshine yellow to island green, along with red, blue, and beige stripes. Painting the full livery adds only about 6.6 pounds, which has a negligible impact on fuel consumption. These five colors stand for the facets of the diversity of Condor’s guests, employees, and the multitude of opportunities to discover the world with Condor. This look will be carried across all the elements of Condor, right from striped scarves for crew members and stripy towels for business class passengers.
Sustainable re-branding
The crew uniforms, accessories such as neckerchiefs, ties, and pins everything will shine in the new design which will also make its way on board, to the airports, on the website, and on social media: in the coming weeks and months, many items on board will be replaced, such as cups, blankets, and cutlery, as well as all materials on the ground such as boarding passes, ID cards and airport signage. The replacement will run successively, with nothing of old design being disposed of, but everything being used up. Around 80 percent of the fleet is to be repainted by 2024 because new paint jobs are due anyway. Condor is thus choosing the most sustainable way to redesign its brand identity and fleet.
New trademark ‘Stripes’ on the world’s largest branding canvas
Brand helps people identify a company, product, or individual and branding is a way of identifying a business. It is how the customers recognize and experience the business. Condor as a brand represents fun, happiness, and vacation time and vacation are stripes. Join the two together and lo! You get a brand-new livery representing the Condor culture, their passion, and their uniqueness.
The rebranding decision was taken well before the pandemic, and the new look is inspired by parasols, bath towels, and beach chairs, umbrellas. The stripes are rooted in decades of fashion trends, from the sailor look, ushered into popular fashion in the 1910s by Coco Chanel, to Hollywood icons like James Dean and Marlon Brando, who wore casual Breton shirts in the ’50s. Incidentally, Condor’s very first boarding pass was covered in red and white stripes.
Condor is evolving into a distinctive and unique vacation airline.
Ralf Teckentrup, CEO of Condor said, “Condor has transformed over the past two and a half years: From a subsidiary of a vertically integrated travel group to an independent airline that looks back proudly on its history and tradition, while at the same time embarking on the path to the future. We want to express this unmistakably through our corporate identity: Condor is vacationing and Condor is unmistakable – like our new design, which we are now launching into the future. Our new trademark is stripes, our figurative mark stands for our origin and the colors for diversity. This triad is new, what remains is our passion. It has always made Condor unique and is therefore also reflected in our claim: Passion is our compass.”
Revising a brand identity
The conception and creation of the new brand identity came about under the direction of Remo Masala, owner of the creative agency vision alphabet in Berlin. “Revising Condor’s brand identity with its long tradition is a delicate interplay based on respect for its origins and requirements for the future. Our goal was to endow Condor with special visual independence, the rationale of which is united in Condor’s brand essence: the invention of the vacation flight, and the effective vacation code, the stripes of summer, joy, and freedom.”
Their corporate identity’s lead colors are yellow and blue. They have been complemented by the contrasting color grey. The Condor signet, the condor in a circle, goes back to one of Germany’s most influential designers, Otl Aicher. The figurative mark has been given a facelift, with finer and more dynamic lines. It can be found again in the tail unit of the aircraft. The Condor lettering has also been adapted: It is now more compact, and the new lower case has made the wordmark more independent and consistent with the image. The logo appears in high-contrast black on the fuselage of the aircraft.
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With the engagement in social media, one can assume that Condor has increased its level of awareness. And all this without paying for advertising.
