Southeast Asia, 2012.

Lazada was founded in 2012 by Maximilian Bittner, with backing from the German company builder Rocket Internet, according to Wikipedia. The plan was to build an online store on the model of Amazon for Southeast Asia, at a time when online shopping in the region was still young. Lazada’s websites soft-launched in 2012, and its iOS and Android apps followed in June 2013.

The business model changed quickly. Lazada began by selling stock from its own warehouses to consumers, Wikipedia says, and in the following year opened its platform to third-party retailers as well, turning the shop into a marketplace. The company began operations in Singapore in May 2014, and Singapore is where it is headquartered today.

Its early years were shaped by the practical problems of selling online in the region. Wikipedia describes a market in 2015 in which many shoppers still preferred physical stores, and in which Lazada had to deal with low credit-card use, the need for cash on delivery and the difficulty of reliable delivery outside the cities.

The name has a Chinese form too. Wikipedia gives it as 來贊達, alongside the Latin spelling used on the app and the website. The marketplace operates across Southeast Asia, Wikipedia says, though not in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Brunei or East Timor. Over the years it added services under its own name, including LazMall, launched in September 2018 to sell goods from authentic brands, along with a 15-day return policy and next-day delivery options.

An Alibaba company.

Ownership changed in 2016. In April 2016, Alibaba Group announced that it would acquire a controlling stake in Lazada to support its own international expansion, according to Wikipedia, and it increased its stake again in June 2017. Before that, Lazada had been funded by investors including Tesco, Temasek, Summit Partners, JPMorgan Chase and Kinnevik, Wikipedia says.

The new owner brought its own playbook. The Drum reported on 20 June 2019 that Lazada had been taking investment from Alibaba, “which now owns the brand”, and introducing its technology, talent and features. Among the features Lazada had borrowed from Alibaba’s e-commerce business, the magazine said, were LazMall and livestreaming, which Lazada had debuted with a Dua Lipa concert for its birthday earlier that year.

Lazada’s group chief marketing officer, Mary Zhou, described the balance to The Drum as one between Alibaba’s technology and local insight about what people in Southeast Asia wanted. “Powered by the technology from Alibaba and by getting the local understanding and the insight, we can combine these two parts fairly well,” she said. She described livestreaming as a format in which Lazada acted as a platform bringing different parties together, rather than as a content provider.

The corporate structure above the brand has kept changing. In 2023, Wikipedia says, Alibaba reorganised itself into six business units under a holding company, and Lazada was placed in the Alibaba International Digital Commerce unit. In September 2025 Lazada started a programme that lets merchants from Alibaba’s Tmall sell into Southeast Asia through Lazada without opening separate local stores, with Lazada handling logistics, customs and local-language customer service.

Founders, icons and merged names.

Company identities in Asia often grow out of a single founder group or family holding, and the corporate mark has to cover businesses as varied as refining, retail, telecoms and software. The name tends to stay fixed while the symbol beside it is redrawn as the group changes shape, so one logo can sit above many trading names at once.

For app-first businesses the logo and the app icon are frequently the same object. A mark that must read at the size of a fingertip on a crowded phone screen is drawn as a simple, closed shape in one strong colour, and the full wordmark is reserved for larger formats such as signage, delivery bags and helmets.

Campaign naming built on calendar dates, in which a day and month repeated as numbers become the name of a sales event, is a recurring pattern in regional e-commerce. The date itself works as a brand asset that can be printed, counted down and repeated each year.

Mergers and new holding structures are a common trigger for redesign. A combined group may add a new parent name above existing consumer brands, or redraw a symbol to signal a shift from a single service to a wider platform, while keeping familiar colours so that customers still recognise the product.

Go where your heart beats.

Lazada’s brand had gone five years without a refresh when, in June 2019, it was redrawn. Inside Retail Asia reported on 21 June 2019 that the company had launched a campaign called “Go Where Your Heart Beats” along with a new brand identity with a more youthful, energetic look, featuring a new heart logomark, a new typeface and a new palette of Lazada colours. The identity was developed by Superunion Singapore, and the campaign was conceived and produced by Wunderman Thompson Singapore, the trade site said.

The heart has two readings. When it is turned, it also looks like the letter L for Lazada, The Drum reported. Zhou told the magazine that Lazada’s internal designers had noticed the shape was close to the company’s initial, and that the team also wanted to be “closer to the heartbeat” of shoppers in Southeast Asia rather than only the transactional side of buying. She called the shape the “heart gram”.

The mark was not entirely new in 2019. According to The Drum, the heart had been introduced publicly during one of Lazada’s seasonal sales the year before, when brands were invited to take the heart shape and customise it to promote their own deals. Zhou said the company hoped to work with brands on using it again in future, describing the heart as universal enough to sit with every customer and every brand.

The campaign told three stories. A long-form film, shown in cinemas with shorter versions online and on television, followed a mother who turns her passion for baking into a business, an office worker who becomes a rock musician, and a young woman who builds a career in nail art after watching livestreamed content, The Drum said. Print, outdoor and digital advertising carried the same characters, and the heart was to be introduced gradually across the company’s brand assets.

For a design guide, Lazada shows how a single shape can carry an initial and an emotion at once, and how a marketplace can test a symbol in a sale before making it the logo. Compare Shopee, its regional e-commerce neighbour, and Grab, another app brand based in Singapore. For this guide we use pink, a night blue and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Lazada’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.