For over a year now, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to hear compliments on our logo although I can’t take much of the credit for it. It was a wonderful creation from the brains of my favorite marketing guru, Liane Caruso, and her team. We had our input, of course, and we wanted to share the history and significance of each piece of our logo. While most folks see one bright, colorful piece of art, it is actually a combination of many different pieces of historical significance from the hippy era.
The 7 different symbols that make up our logo are all featured in the main tree, which is the first item. Within the tree you’ll find a peace hand, a heart, a yin-yang, a sign for female, and a sign for male all surrounding a bird known as a Wandervogel.
Most of these I’m sure you are already familiar with and can make the connection for how they relate to a hippy shop. But let’s go through them all.
- 1. The Tree (and the butterflies and flowers) represents nature and all her glory. The hippie movement had at one point grown into a love and admiration for Mother Earth and seeing the beauty in all living things. Most iconic hippie pictures show girls with flowers in their hair and groups listening to music outside in the middle of a field.
- 2. The hippie movement adopted a hand gesture to represent peace. After all, actions speak louder than words, right? The gesture was originally called the “V Sign” and stood for victory. Think about if that weren’t really synonymous though – a world full of Peace would surely be a victory in itself!
- 3. The heart refers to the spiritual, emotional, moral and intellectual core of a human. Regardless of race or religion, at the very core we are all, in fact, the very same. The symbolism itself is quite unifying.
- 4. The yin-yang literally means “Shadow and Light.” It’s used to describe polar opposites that are actually interconnected. The origins are in Chinese Science and Philosophy and simply mean that the seen and unseen are complimentary forces working together.
- 5 & 6. The signs for female and male are best described together as the hippie movement was a generation of love and awareness. The symbols are astrological and have been used since the Renaissance. They were first used to decide gender in plants.
- 7. The most historically significant is actually my favorite part of the logo – the image of ‘Der Wandervogel. ‘ To explain the significance of this, we need to have a quick little history lesson though. We’ve all heard about hippies and the hippie movement and can make connections in some fashion to the 60’s and 70’s. But did you know that this movement was actually started in Germany in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s as a youth movement? This group made an entire social network founded upon cultural clubs that were centered on folk music. Dress was actually quite dull by today’s standards in both color and design as the focus wasn’t on aesthetics. The group adopted a bird – the Wandervogel – known for it’s “rambling, hiking or wandering nature” as it’s mascot and was determined to shake off restrictions of society, live naturally, embrace the freedom and share their individuality. It wasn’t until 60 years later that the movement made it’s way to the US and grew into the culture that we all now know and love.
