Home Centre Brand Guidelines: Landmark’s 1995 Sharjah Furniture Store and Its 2022 Identity

A Landmark Group furniture chain from 1995.

Home Centre is the furniture and home-furnishings chain of the Landmark Group, the Dubai-based retail and hospitality group that The National reported in September 2023 had begun in 1973 with one shop in Bahrain, opened by the businessman Micky Jagtiani. By that report the group ran more than 2,200 outlets in 21 countries, with more than 50,000 employees, and Home Centre was named among its brands alongside Centrepoint, Babyshop, Splash, Lifestyle, Max, Shoe Mart and Emax.

Home Centre began with a single store in Sharjah, in the UAE. Gulf News, interviewing the chain’s chief executive in May 2010, dated the launch to 1995, and the trade magazine Images RetailME gave the same year and the same Sharjah start in December 2016. When the brand marked its 25th anniversary in January 2022, Khaleej Times reported that the group’s chairwoman recalled the one Sharjah store and said the idea had come from the founder: a home store that felt aspirational but stayed affordable, where anyone could find something for their home.

By May 2010, Gulf News reported, Home Centre had 11 large-format showrooms and about 1,500 employees in the UAE, and around 50 stores across the GCC, Egypt and the Indian subcontinent. Its range covered furniture, furnishings, home accessories, kitchenware and gift ideas. He told the paper that local furniture makers in the UAE worked mostly to contracts for hotels and companies, while Home Centre sold to retail customers across a range of budgets and tastes. The paper itself described Home Centre as a local retailer then working to become a regional player by expanding its footprint across the GCC.

India and the flagships.

Home Centre also travelled east. Inside Retail Asia reported in November 2013 that Landmark had taken several of its core concepts to India — Home Centre among them, alongside the value-fashion chain Max and the high-street fashion chain Splash — after Lifestyle, the group’s department-store chain, had opened its first Indian store in Chennai in 1999.

In the UAE the chain used its larger stores as showcases. In 2010, Gulf News said, Home Centre had just opened its 11th UAE store, at Mirdif City Centre in Dubai, which the chief executive described as giving shoppers from Sharjah and Ajman access to “the new Home Centre experience.” On 8 December 2016 the chain reopened its Mall of the Emirates store in Dubai after a complete makeover. Images RetailME reported that this was Home Centre’s flagship and the first store to be refitted in line with the brand’s new vision, combining a customer-focused layout and product offer with interactive digital technology that linked online and in-store shopping. By then, the magazine said, Home Centre had grown into a network of more than 95 stores in 10 countries, with more than four million square feet of store space.

The brand changed its look in January 2022. Gulf News reported on 19 January that Home Centre had unveiled a new brand identity together with a redesigned store at City Centre Mirdif: at 79,000 square feet its largest in the UAE, with six apartment set-ups that offer customers styling tips and ideas for their own rooms. The identity launched with a campaign called “Inspired By You,” and the chain then operated more than 70 stores, according to the paper.

Gulf retail in public.

Gulf fashion, home and online retailers present themselves first through the places where people shop. In the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and their neighbours, many chains trade from large mall units, and the store fascia, a name in lit letters above a wide entrance, is often the first piece of branding a shopper sees. Groups that run several chains often place them side by side in the same mall, or gather them under one umbrella name, so that a single visit can cover clothing, shoes, children’s goods and homeware.

Value-fashion and home chains speak through campaigns timed to the retail calendar: seasonal collections, catalogues and named sale events. Their identity work tends to show up in store refits as much as in advertising. A new logo usually arrives with a redesigned flagship, new signage and new in-store graphics, and then spreads to the rest of the estate store by store, sometimes over months or years.

Online retailers carry the same task onto app screens, product pages and delivery packaging. There the brand becomes a set of repeated elements: a wordmark, a colour, a tone of voice in notifications, and the boxes and bags that arrive at the door. Store groups in the region also run their own apps and click-and-collect services, so the line between the shop and the screen is less sharp than it once was.

Store names are usually plain and descriptive, and the companies publish them in English as they appear above the door. Corporate pages and dated press coverage give the facts behind those names: who founded each business and when, which family or group owns it, and whether its shares are listed on an exchange such as Tadawul, ADX or DFM. These guides draw on those dated sources and describe colour and type only as our own interpretation, with no logo or fascia reproduced.

Rooms as the brand.

The 2022 coverage gave more detail on how the identity was put together. Khaleej Times reported that before the launch the brand ran a regional campaign, “Your Home. Your Home Centre.”, with a digital activation that asked people across the GCC what home meant to them, including their preferred colour, texture, pattern and object, and that the answers fed into the thinking behind the new identity. More than 12,000 people took part, according to the report. The brand also marked the launch with a new trend collection and catalogue, including a capsule collection by the Lebanese-American designer Farah Merhi, and the Mirdif store added dedicated category areas, a children’s entertainment area, click-and-collect and personalised design services, the paper said.

Across these reports the store is the main medium for the brand. The Mall of the Emirates flagship in 2016 and the City Centre Mirdif store in 2022 were each used to introduce a new look, and the 2022 format sets furniture out in six apartment set-ups that show pieces arranged as rooms. The chief executive of Home Centre told Gulf News in 2022 that the change was meant to run across the various touchpoints of the organisation, not only the logo.

For a design guide, Home Centre shows how a furniture retailer can use its largest stores as the first place a new identity appears, and how a brand refresh can be presented through room sets as much as through a mark. Compare Centrepoint, the Landmark Group’s four-brand store, and Max, its value-fashion chain. For this guide we use a terracotta, an oak brown, a sage green and a warm linen with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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