CVS Health has over 9,000 locations across the United States and offers a wide range of Over-The-Counter (OTC) products to treat everything from allergies and aches to bruises and colds, with nearly 3,000 SKUs.
The pharmacy giant recently worked with design studio Pearlfisher to revamp its healthcare line. It is now rolling out its new look, starting with 68 pain reliever products and a complete phase-in across 20 categories, which is expected to be completed by next year.
“While we continuously look to innovate our brands, we have not done a complete revisit of the CVS Health brand identity in almost 10 years,” said Mike Wier, VP of store brands at CVS Health. “We embarked on refreshing the brand with a clear goal of simplifying the shopping experience for our customers. Guided by feedback from thousands of customers to ensure their needs were met in the new design, the refreshed CVS brand packaging aims to make it easier than ever for customers to find the solutions they need, in-store or online quickly.”
Pearlfisher designed a new, simplified logo, removing the “Health” underneath the heart and “CVS.” Gradients are dropped, and the visual hierarchy is improved, making labels easier to read and compare against other products. If you’ve ever dashed into a CVS store and stood there staring at a row of different brands and options of any given category, you’ll know it can be bewildering.
New illustrations are pleasant and add more shelf presence. On some packaging, capsules, pills, or longezes are depicted front and center. OTC medicine for children now features a cute ladybug on the new labels, allowing harried parents to visually identify them among the other medications for adults.
“Creating a cohesive master brand that unifies more than 20 product categories is no small task. We developed a robust pillar architecture that grouped categories by shared consumer values, then defined the visual shifts within each pillar,” said Drew Stocker, creative director at Pearlfisher. “This included establishing which brand assets remained fixed and which could flex to meet the needs of each category. The greatest challenge lay in designing solutions that are both aligned with consumer expectations and can be applied seamlessly to the range of product sizes and category cues that we were designing for due to the size of the CVS brand portfolio.”
Unsurprisingly, updating 3,000 SKUs across 20 categories was a time-consuming effort.
“This refresh was a thoughtful, multi-phase process that took over a year to complete. It involved close collaboration across teams, all grounded in feedback from real CVS customers to guide our outcome,” Wier said.
As consumers feel the pinch of inflation, tariffs, and other factors that impact their purchasing power, many more consumers will likely start turning to products more competitively priced than national brands, like CVS’s private-label alternatives. And it’s something the pharmacy chain is paying close attention to, as it launched its Well Market snack line last year and updated its beauty categories in 2023.
Indeed, private-label brands are having a moment, and anything that eases the strain on your wallet is a welcomed sign of relief.
