Refining American luxury.
Client
Creative Director
Povilas Utovka
Team
Greg Gazdowicz
Christian Schwartz
Illustration
Caroline Church
Mark Cross is a luxury leather goods purveyor founded in Boston in 1845 to make equestrian products like saddles and bridles. After moving to New York, the company shifted its focus to luggage, gloves, and handbags—most famously the boxy bag Grace Kelly carries in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.
Mark Cross fell dormant in the 1990s and relaunched in 2011; in 2023, consulting creative director Povilas Utovka invited the Design Studio to help with an overhaul, synthesizing a 179-year history of brand elements into a concise identity system built for today.
We refined the primary stacked logotype, complementing it with a secondary lettering style loosely based on monograms found on luggage in the company’s archives. This secondary face, a flared, gently expanded sans serif, is used for auxiliary branding elements and subheads. We commissioned illustrator Caroline Church to update the heraldic lion icon. After studying a wide range of interpretations, she arrived at a singular icon that not only looks completely contemporary, but also respects the brand’s heritage.
The logotype and lion nest into a hexagonal footprint, a shape repeated throughout the Mark Cross brand language—particularly on hardware, where these elements are often etched. Both the logotype and lion were drawn across a range of scales meant for different applications and materials.