Carl Gerhards was at the HOW Design Live conference in Nashville to talk about the rebrand, I mean, ‘the next generation of the Pepsi logo‘. It’s rare to have such a large company make a shift in their identity in today’s age and get a lot of positive feedback from the design community, which this one deserves. To my surprise, this was mostly handled in-house. It was fun to talk with someone about what is involved in a rebrand of this scale – the Pepsi brand alone has around 300 SKUs for packaging in the the US, and around 2,000 worldwide.

We also talk about their t-shirt operation in the exhibit hall at HOW Design Live, as well as if you hang around after the show, the news that the new Pepsi blue is none other than, you guessed it, Reflex Blue! And we talk about growing an in house team, like the PepsiCo Design + Innovation one Carl is at.

Since I have been podcasting, starting with the Be A Design Cast in 2005 to the Reflex Blue Show of today, we always had a little thing of who we’d love to talk with about design, and honestly, I’ve spoken with more people on that list than I ever imagined I would, but one of the few missing ones was someone who worked on the brand we seem to discuss as much as any other over the years, Mountain Dew. We have spent many episodes talking about new flavors, have had multiple taste tests, and probably have a slide or two about it in most of the presentations we have given, but have never actually spoken to someone about what it’s like to work as a designer for the brand itself. When I saw Carl was speaking at HOW Design Live this year, he was the first person on my list because of this. So yes, we talk about designing for Mountain Dew.

Enjoy.

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