Some time back I saw a post on Quora asking: “Which is world’s most expensive logo ever?”
And that got me thinking about Best Products. In 1979 I was working as a freelance designer at (among others) Webb & Athey (their advertising agency of record at the time), when Best Products hired the New York design firm of Chermayeff & Geismar to create a new logo.
I seem to remember they were rumored to have paid the astronomical sum of $250,000.00 for the logo (I have no idea whether or not that was true. Can anyone recall?). Suffice it to say, the top branding companies have always commanded impressive fees for developing brand strategies.
In case you did not know, Best Products was one of the first companies to popularize the “catalog showroom” in the 1970s—a retail model that came and went in the course of roughly 20 years. But the company’s real claim to fame was the interest its owners, Sydney and Frances Lewis, had in art and architecture and how they helped to pioneer the collaboration between business and creative.
The logo, considered groundbreaking at the time, now has a spot in the BEST Cafe in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia where Sydney and Frances Lewis donated much of their treasure. The VMFA describes BEST Products and the logo as follows: “Founded in the late 1950s by VMFA benefactors Sydney and Frances Lewis, Best Products, or simply BEST, was a catalog retailer that specialized in appliances and household wares. Thomas Geismar, a co-founder of the New York design firm Chermayeff and Geismar, designed the company’s logo. The ascending composition of the logo acknowledged the name’s superlative nature—as in good, better, best. This version of the bold red letters marked the Parham Road headquarters in Richmond, Virginia.”
I took this closeup to show you the unique ascending width of the letters.
Identify: Basic Principles of Identity Design in the Iconic Trademarks of Chermayeff & Geismar…
The Best Products Catalog, 1980…
An article about the architecture…
From MoMA: Buildings for Best Products (12.2MB PDF)…
From FailedArchitecture.com: The Ironic Loss of the Postmodern Best Store Facades…
From ArchDaily: When Art, Architecture and Commerce Collided: The BEST Products Showrooms by SITE…
About Sydney and Francis Lewis and their art background…
From SITE, the architectural firm that designed the buildings…
Architect James Wines on “nature’s revenge”:
Posted in JUNE 2025 / Chuck Green is the principal of Logic Arts, a design and marketing firm, a contributor to numerous magazines and websites, and the author of books published by Random House, Peachpit Press, and Rockport Publishers. All rights reserved. Copyright 2007-2025 Chuck Green/Logic Arts Corporation. Contact.
Yes!! I never worked for Best buy a close family did. Best was part of the lives of Richmonders
Their ideas like walking trails (I think) quirky architecture were so much fun!