A large-scale rebrand project with a single-minded mission: translating Careem’s current brand to an entirely refreshed design language that stays true to our heritage, while capturing our evolved product, mission and vision.

After years of building an iconic brand, we realized it doesn’t represent who we are today and how much we’ve changed (from ride-hail only to a multi-service app). The answer wasn’t just to reskin Careem. We created a new brand identity that’s rooted in conceptual, strategic and data-driven design philosophies, across every touchpoint. A project driven by a profound question: how do we refresh an already iconic brand?

Careem was founded in 2013, as the region’s first home grown ride hailing service. It is regarded as a cinderella story - becoming the first Middle Eastern startup to reach a $1billion valuation in 2017, before

being acquired by Uber in 2019 for $3.1billion. Whilst this acquisition had a significant impact on the local ecosystem - inspiring confidence and creating a wake of many further unicorn companies- for Careem it led to an identity crisis. 100% ownership by Uber created uncertainty on the future of the Careem brand, with an obvious overlap of a service that many believed could be the first step towards a full incorporation under Uber.

However, Careem had a vision to evolve their purpose to simplify lives beyond getting people from A to B. Careem had ambitions to become an Everything App - one place for all everyday services, a model that had seen success in the East, failed in the West, and not been attempted in the Middle. Starting with Food delivery, and then tackling adjacent use cases such as grocery, flowers and pharmacy, Careem evolved its offering to over 20 forms of everyday services, which today includes financial, home, and entertainment services.

While Careem proved some product market fit with this vision, with a changing global economy driving focus on profitability, Careem knew that real traction needed to be attained super fast.

After spending 10 years building people’s trust in the leading local ride-hailing app, brand has evolved from strictly offering the mobility of people to offering the mobility of all things, with an ambition to become the region’s first Everything App. With a deeply rooted heritage in ride-hailing, we were presented with a significant obstacle: people see us as a rides app, only.

The brief was to change people’s perception and sell them on our multi-service app.The objective was not just to spread awareness, but also build trust in an evolved Careem brand that offers a range of services.

An enormous project, spanning over 12 months, redesigning every single touchpoint, from online to offline, in-app and product, internally & externally across 11 markets, with a budget of $3million.

To shift customer perception from being a ride-hail to an Everything App, we needed to evolve our brand itself.

The idea started with the creation of a new brand architecture that splits our offerings into 4 categories (Go, Eat, Get, Pay) and supports the growing list of everyday services. With an incredibly wide target audience, this brand architecture allows all kinds of customers to easily and intuitively navigate the app.

Proud of the app we’ve spent years building, we realized our refreshed brand needed to retain iconic elements but reinvent itself to be more modern and current, reflecting contemporary design philosophies, advancements in tech, capturing who we are and standing out from the rest of the market. After all, the shift to an Everything App meant our competition wasn’t just ride-hailing services, but now included everything from food & grocery delivery services, financial solutions and entertainment services.

The whole 12-month process meticulously crafting every element started with the first decision- retaining and refining iconic elements, our logo and wordmark. Next, we created a brand architecture with 4 service categories, housing 20+ sub-brands. We then built the foundation of our design system: shapes inspired by everyday actions (shopping, paying, moving) with the power to change, move, expand to form endless visual possibilities, such as patterns and masks. Our new icons were formed from these shapes.

We introduced a new vivid colour palette with primary and secondary colours, all designed for screen first. A new art direction to represent our diverse audience and present clean compositions. We didn’t stop there: we changed our tone of voice and created sonic and audio branding tailored to our key markets.

An entirely new design system- the complete brand overhaul included uniforms, offices, delivery bikes, welcome kits, product, in-app touchpoints, and more.

The rebrand project’s success was enormous and exceeded our KPIs.

With a mission to change perception from a ride-hailing app to a multi-service app, we achieved a 70% increase in understanding that Careem offers multiple services in one place.

But perception was just the start. We saw incredible results across specific hero services such as food, where awareness of our Food delivery service doubled, resulting in a 46.7% increase in orders,

Another service that saw an even greater uplift was Groceries with a whopping increase of 109% in orders. The rebrand successfully drove a significant change in customer behaviour,, turning them from ride-hailing users only to multi-service users, resulting in an increase in the number of multi-service users by 2.5x. Lastly, subscribers to Careem Plus, our subscription program that unlocks value across all services, rose by 130%