Bringing Two Brands Together
Global Blue is a global provider of tax-free shopping, dynamic currency conversion, and payments, known for its airport tax refund services and luxury airport lounges, operating in 45 countries across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, China, Australia, and the Americas. When Shift4 completed its $2.5B acquisition, the largest in company history, I co-led the brand integration alongside Shift4's SVP of Marketing, bringing the majority of Global Blue's identity onto Shift4's visual system while preserving brand equity where it mattered most, working across time zones and departments to align the newly combined company.
When Shift4 acquired Global Blue, the two companies needed to align on a single visual identity. Global Blue had no in-house design team, previously relying on a contracting agency, and its workforce was spread primarily across Europe and Asia, spanning multiple departments and time zones.
The challenge wasn't just visual. It was building trust and clarity with a team that hadn't worked with an in-house design function before, while navigating meaningful nuance: parts of the business, like Global Blue's luxury retail tax-free shopping division, had built brand equity with major luxury retail partners that needed to be preserved rather than erased.
I partnered with a program director, the SVP of Marketing, and a marketing director on the Global Blue side to align stakeholders and execute the identity integration, while simultaneously leading creative for Shift4's concurrent acquisition of Smart Pay, based in Australia and New Zealand. Given the time difference, this meant a demanding cadence of weekly, sometimes multiple times a week, meetings, often before standard work hours to accommodate teams across Europe, Asia, and Oceania.
Executive leadership made the call to preserve Global Blue's luxury retail tax-free shopping division under its existing branding, adding "by Shift4" to the logo to visually connect it to the parent brand while protecting the equity it had built with major luxury retail partners. I executed that direction: updating Global Blue's brand guidelines to reflect the new identity, and partnering with the program director to create internal communications that clearly outlined what was changing and which assets to use where, critical given the team had no in-house design experience to draw on.
The integration extended into physical space as well. When the team wanted to rebrand Global Blue's Vienna office to Shift4, I led the creation of Office Branding Guidelines, partnering with the program director and Facilities team to build a scalable framework any office could follow, rather than a one-off treatment for Vienna alone.
Global Blue's brand materials, from templates to day-to-day collateral, were successfully transitioned to Shift4's identity, giving the newly combined company a unified, consistent presence despite having no prior in-house design function to build from.
What also began as a single-office request also became a repeatable framework. The Office Branding Guidelines have since been applied across 7 office locations, spanning both former Global Blue offices and existing Shift4 offices in the US, and are now the default process for any future Shift4 office branding.