An electronics stall of 1998 and a web shop of 2004.

JD.com began as a shop, not a website. English Wikipedia says Liu Qiangdong, known in English as Richard Liu, started his business Jingdong in June 1998 in the Zhongguancun high-tech district of Beijing, as a distributor of magneto-optical products. The South China Morning Post reported on 14 November 2014 that in 1998 Liu set up Jingdong Century Trading, a consumer electronics shop specialising in magneto-optical products, and that the business grew into a small chain of stores over the next five years.

An epidemic pushed the shop online. The South China Morning Post said that when SARS swept China in 2003 it kept customers at home and left the business in difficulty. Liu, the paper reported, launched an online retail website in 2004 and founded JD.com later that year, and by 2005 all of the original bricks-and-mortar stores had closed. English Wikipedia gives the early web address as jdlaser.com.

The web shop changed its name more than once before settling on two letters. A report by the Chinese technology site MyDrivers, carried on ifeng.com on 30 March 2020, says the site opened in January 2004 as Jingdong Multimedia and was renamed Jingdong Mall in June 2007, when it also took a new domain. English Wikipedia gives that domain as 360buy.com, from June 2007.

The date of the Zhongguancun opening survives in the calendar. The same MyDrivers report gives the founding day as 18 June 1998, and JD’s mid-year shopping festival, known as 618, is named after that month and day. The company is headquartered in Beijing. Its Chinese group name, English Wikipedia says, is 京东集团, Jingdong Group.

360buy becomes JD.com, and a metal dog arrives.

The gap between the two names closed in the spring of 2013. The company’s corporate blog says that on 30 March 2013 JD.com became the official domain name of the company, and that the mascot Joy, at that time a metal dog, made its debut on the same day. TechNode reported on 24 April 2013 that 360Buy had recently been rebranded as JD.com. MyDrivers, in its 2020 report, said the company dropped the word for “mall” from its Chinese name at the same time, becoming simply Jingdong.

The brand consultancy Labbrand, writing about a month after the launch, set out the reasoning as it saw it. Consumers, it said, found it hard to connect “360buy” with the Chinese name Jingdong, and many reached the site by searching for it on Baidu. Labbrand quoted Liu as saying: “The simpler domain name and the more human logo represent our joyful shopping experiences for consumers and new values for suppliers.”

The two letters were given a meaning of their own. Labbrand reported that the launch advertising explained JD through four Chinese phrases whose initials are J and D: Jue Ding, decision; Jie Du, reading and understanding; Jian Dan, simplification; and Ji Dong, passion. The same piece noted that reporters and shoppers quickly read the dog as an answer to the cat used by the rival platform Tmall.

The mascot also had a designer and a stated purpose. Digitaling published an article by the logo news column Logo News on 6 July 2021 saying that Joy was designed by the creative team of the Chinese digital creative group 180China, and that it was introduced to stand for loyalty, integrity and speed. The 2013 Joy, the article said, was silver all over and leaned forward with a slight smile. JD’s corporate blog says the dog was chosen because dogs are known for loyalty, and that Joy represents integrity and the company’s commitment to authentic products and fast delivery. In 2020 the blog quoted Lei Xu, then chief executive of JD Retail, as saying he was the father of the concept of Joy.

The company’s corporate ties changed the next year. The South China Morning Post reported in November 2014 that in March of that year Tencent had taken a stake in JD and transferred its own e-commerce businesses, QQ Wanggou and Paipai, to the company, and that JD.com then listed on Nasdaq within months.

Indian and Chinese company marks.

Company brands from India and China often carry their history in the name itself. Many Indian groups are named after a founding family, and the surname on the letterhead can stand for a bank, a steel works and a soap at the same time. In that setting a logo has to work across very different businesses, so the identity tends to lean on one wordmark, one colour and a consistent way of setting the family name rather than on a single product picture.

Chinese internet and retail companies grew up with two names: a Chinese name in characters and a Latin-letter name for domains, app stores and overseas markets. Some began with a pinyin spelling, some shortened a long name to a few letters, and some changed their Latin name entirely as they moved beyond their home market. Each rename has to keep the visual memory of the old mark while making the new one easy to read.

Mascots and uniforms do a lot of the work. A cartoon animal can appear on an app icon, a parcel and a billboard, and a delivery rider’s jacket, helmet and box turn a city street into a moving sign. For designers, these everyday surfaces are where the colour and the character of a company brand are seen most often.

Joy loses its metal and turns its head.

The metal dog did not stay metal. Digitaling reported in 2021 that on 26 August 2017 JD reworked its brand and its mascot: the domain “JD.COM” and the shopping slogan, were removed from the logo, and Joy lost its metal shell to become a small white dog in a grey-white gradient, with a shorter body, a fuller head and a wider smile. MyDrivers, in 2020, described the August 2017 logo as flatter and Joy as rounder and friendlier.

The dog kept changing in smaller steps. Digitaling said JD had made a three-dimensional Joy from 2018, although its website and app icon kept the side-on figure. During the 618 festival of 2021, the article said, the app icon turned Joy to a three-quarter view and cropped it to the head and a little of the shoulders, and that version stayed after the festival ended. JD’s corporate blog, writing for Joy’s seventh birthday on 31 March 2020, said Joy’s faces had become rounder and more cordial as the business widened, that there were many versions in other colours and costumes, that Lego had designed special Joy statues for the company, and that Joy had starred in the short films JOY and Heron and JOY and Koi. The blog also named a wider cast of mascot friends, the DOGA family, who appear with Joy at the company’s festivals.

The mascot sits inside the trademark itself. A case study by the World Intellectual Property Organization describes JD’s core trademark as “JOY + JD.COM”, registered internationally through the Madrid System, and says the logo is composed of JD’s characters and its mascot, an animated white dog called Joy. WIPO adds that Joy has appeared in short films for the Chinese Year of the Dog in 2018 and in videos with other companies’ characters, including Hello Kitty and LINE FRIENDS.

The leadership has changed as well. English Wikipedia says Sandy Ran Xu, chief financial officer since 2020, became chief executive officer in May 2023, succeeding Lei Xu, and that in March 2026 the company launched Joybuy, its European online retail business, in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.

For a design guide, JD.com shows how a company can close the gap between a foreign-language web address and a home-language name by shrinking both to two letters, then let a mascot carry the warmth. Compare Alibaba, whose Tmall cat the dog was read against, and Tencent, which took a stake in JD in 2014. For this guide we use red, deep red and white-grey with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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