Why this company ditched tech blue for construction yellow in its new logo

For years, the connected operations company Samsara positioned itself as a digital tool, and it had the branding to match. Its old logo was a blue, abstracted owl with a nondescript lowercase sans-serif wordmark that looked generically tech but didn’t say anything about what the company does. As it grows, however, Samsara’s new rebrand tells more of a story about the physical, real world places its product shows up.

Samsara sells software and solutions for fleet management and physical operations. The company describes its customers as asset-heavy and labor-intensive, like the shipping and logistics company DHL, the car rental service Hertz, and Sears Home Services, which provides in-home appliance repair. Samsara does things like improving their routing and reducing accidents and safety incidents, which adds up, especially for its biggest customers that have operating costs totaling about 80% of revenue.

Instead of a vague tech-style visual identity, the rebrand from the creative studio Base Design looks more like a construction company, with a bolder logo and a yellow color scheme that looks like the equipment used by some of its customers. It’s designed to convey the idea of building.

The rebrand comes as Samsara grows due to factors like AI data center construction, government investment in aging infrastructure, waste intelligence for garbage and recycling collection, and ridership management for transit systems. Samsara announced 30% year-over-year growth in June, with nearly $2 billion in annual recurring revenue; the rebrand lands as the company looks to build on that momentum.

After speaking with Samsara customers, including people in senior leadership, frontline operators, and truck drivers, designers from Base Design landed on a central theme for the brand’s visual identity of “build with,” positioning Samsara as a partner for building together.

“It’s an ongoing thing, building with the customers, building with the engineers, like doing things hand in hand, and then iterating and repeating,” Base Design’s creative director, Daniel Peterson, tells Fast Company.

The idea that Samsara is always building “became sort of an organizing idea,” he says. The aim was to blend two different aesthetics to represent Samsara in the lab and in the field, or its work with engineers versus on the ground with customers, drivers, workers, trucks, and equipment.