Korea’s largest shopping app rebrands to weather breakneck fashion trends

You’ve likely heard about it by now. TikTok has sliced the lifetime of fashion trends into slithers of what they once were. 2022 was ruled by one trend du jour after another (with the harmful impact of these “micro trends” and the outfitters that supply them recorded widely). Brooklyn-based Porto Rocha has recently rebranded Zigzag to “keep pace” with this flux, the agency reveals in a press release. The shopping app is the largest in Korea, with over 35 million downloads and a strong Gen Z following.

The release describes how Zigzag needed a “more precise, contemporary identity”, beginning with the wordmark. Porto Rocha drew from the typography of fashion periodicals, which often denote a bespoke character, to swap Zigzag’s typically digital wordmark into “one that can span from a support mechanism to a bold icon in its own right”. The condensed version of the wordmark, a simple Z, will flux over time, changing its material, tone and palette. A sans serif font was chosen to counterbalance more expressive elements in the brand.

Fonts updates across the identity include Displaay’s Haffer, Kanyon and an open source Pan-CJK typeface, Source Han Serif (Noto) (Korean). And while Zigzag’s previous brand colour remains, Porto Rocha updates the pink to be brighter and cooler to rectify a lack of energy in the previous identity. “Complementing Zigzag pink, we also built out an expansive palette that takes cues from a more youthful fashion world,” says Porto Rocha.

This concept also feeds into a new photography system, where Porto Rocha incorporates an approach that we’re seeing more of recently – the use of cut-out fashion collages, stickers and moodboards, reminiscent, among other things, of dress up online games from the 2000s. A library of custom 3D stickers have also been designed for Zigzag users to experiment with on social platforms.