A Des Moines grocery, a gasoline salesman and a pair of initials.

Casey’s grew out of a family grocery on the north side of Des Moines, Iowa. The International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 1998) says Domenic Lamberti, an Italian immigrant and former coal miner, started a coal and ice delivery business there in 1935, and that it developed into a neighbourhood grocery store with gasoline outside. The Chicago Tribune, profiling the chain in February 1994, described the same business as the Broadway Sales Co. country store and said the Lamberti family lived in an apartment behind it. His son Donald F. Lamberti worked in the store from childhood and took it over in 1960, according to both sources; the directory adds that he left accounting studies at Drake University to do so.

The chain itself began as a partnership. The directory says that in 1967 Kurvin C. Fish, the salesman who supplied Lamberti’s gasoline, persuaded him to buy an oil company in Ames, Iowa, that owned a group of Square Deal service stations. Lamberti provided the capital and Fish agreed to run the business. The Tribune describes Fish as an Iowa gasoline distributor who helped Lamberti find sites, and it calls Lamberti the chain’s co-founder.

The name came from Fish. People knew him by his initials, K.C., and the partners turned those into Casey. Lamberti told the Tribune in 1994 that they had talked about calling the business Lamberti’s General Stores, but wanted a generic name that no one would dislike; the directory repeats the account. Lamberti also told the paper that the chain was modelled on his family’s old general store.

The original Casey’s, the directory says, was a converted gasoline station in Boone, Iowa, that opened in 1968. Lamberti later recalled to a reporter that the partners did not call it a convenience store at first but “a general store with gasoline”. Similar stores soon opened in Creston, Waukee and Saylorville. After Fish’s refinery was taken over by Ashland Oil in 1970, the directory says, financing became harder, so the partners took on more partners and then began franchising stores to keep growing. The original family store in Des Moines later became a Casey’s as well, according to the same source.

A public company, a pizza oven and a wider map.

Casey’s went public in October 1983. The International Directory of Company Histories says the proceeds allowed the company to buy out the subsidiaries that operated its stores, and that it decided at the same time to stop issuing new franchises, although existing franchisees continued. The headquarters settled in Ankeny, a Des Moines suburb, which is still the company’s home.

Food became part of the formula in the same decade. According to the directory, Casey’s began making and selling fresh carry-out pizza in a small number of stores in 1984, began selling it by the slice in 1986, and the same year opened a company commissary to prepare sandwiches for the stores. The directory says the pizza recipe was never changed.

The Chicago Tribune’s 1994 profile pictured a chain spreading along the back roads of the Midwest, from Deland, Illinois, to De Soto, Iowa, and quoted Lamberti describing the stores as comparable to the old ma-and-pa stores, “only with a little more structure and discipline”. He told the paper that all expansion would stay in the Midwest, and that he did not know whether the stores would work elsewhere in the country.

Later growth came largely through acquisitions. CSP Daily News reported in January 2022 that Casey’s had closed its purchase of Buchanan Energy, owner of the Bucky’s stores, in May 2021, had bought sites in Oklahoma from Alimentation Couche-Tard, the owner of Circle K, in a deal that closed in June 2021, and had bought stores from Pilot in September 2021. The same report described a new sub-brand, goodstop by Casey’s, introduced in fiscal 2021 for smaller stores that sell fuel and snacks but lack a kitchen. Company spokesperson Katie Petru told the publication that the sub-brand gave the company flexibility for store and service types, and the company said in a filing that it planned to move all Bucky’s locations to either the Casey’s or the goodstop name.

By 2020 the company was led by chief executive Darren Rebelez, who was quoted announcing the new logo that autumn by CStore Decisions.

Design and documentation.

A convenience-store chain carries its identity across a wide range of surfaces. The fascia above the door, the tall pole sign at the roadside, the fuel canopy and the price board on the forecourt all repeat the same name and colours, and each has to read from a moving car as well as from the pavement. Inside, the same marks return on cups, bags, shelf strips, uniforms and the menu boards behind the counter.

Some chains build that identity around a letterform or a simple shape; others lean on a drawn character or a building silhouette that doubles as a logo, and some keep a compact symbol that can stand alone on a small surface such as an app icon or a cup lid. Because a fascia and a canopy are expensive to change, a new logo usually arrives store by store over several years, so old and new versions can stand side by side for a long time.

Each guide below sets out who started the chain, who owns it now and how its name, logo and signage came about, separating what independent sources record from what the company says about itself.

A barn on the prairie, simplified for a new decade.

The barn has been the Casey’s image for decades. The International Directory of Company Histories says a typical Casey’s of the mid-1980s was a white, barnlike metal building with a red roof, planned in advance down to the layout of the merchandise, the refrigeration and the counters, and that franchisees paid a fee to rent the Casey’s sign and facade. The Chicago Tribune called it a “barn-motif chain” in 1994.

In autumn 2020 the company changed that logo. CStore Decisions reported on 1 October 2020 that Casey’s had unveiled a new logo to sit alongside its recently updated “Here For Good” branding, that logo development had been led by Interbrand, and that the new look kept the company’s barn with white “Casey’s” lettering. A new store in Ankeny was to be the opening showcase for the updated identity across the company’s footprint, followed by television, outdoor and digital advertising and new packaging from October. Adweek reported on 5 October 2020 that the main change was the name itself, shortened to simply Casey’s, dropping General Stores, which the chain felt had become a little old-fashioned. Chief marketing officer Chris Jones said in a statement quoted by Adweek that the logo reflected who the company is in a simpler, more modern way. The design press took note: Brand New, the identity-review site run by UnderConsideration, reviewed the work on 12 October 2020.

Fox 42 KPTM reported on 1 October 2020 that Casey’s was replacing the logo it had carried for half a century, and that changing the signs at every store would take several years. The station quoted a company statement saying that hearing from customers had been part of the process, “just like our founders did when they taped that logo to the ice chest”.

For a design guide, Casey’s shows how a building shape can become a logo, and how a company can simplify that logo and shorten its name while keeping the shape and the colour people already recognise. Compare it with Circle K, whose owner sold Oklahoma stores to Casey’s in 2021, and 7-Eleven. For this guide we use barn red, lettering white and roof charcoal with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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