A record label’s rebrand started in a car — and that is the whole point
Some rebrands start with a mood board. This one started with a car ride.
Milkshake, the Stockholm record label and artist management firm that operates as a division of Sony Music Entertainment, was named during a drive — the founding group pitching names while talking about their favourite drinks. In the years since, cars became the label’s unofficial studio: vehicles were where the team previewed, pitched and assessed unreleased demos in motion. So when Vienna-based STUDIO HERRSTRÖM was asked to give the label a more structured identity for its next phase of growth, it built the system from the thing that was already true: car culture, drink flavours and pop music, fused into one visual language.
The original splash mark has been redrawn as a rounded, blended emblem, keeping the kinetic energy of the original while working cleanly across everything from single artwork to corporate communications. The palette pairs saturated beverage cues — neon pinks, high-vis yellows — against asphalt blacks and soft lilacs. Information lockups borrow the functional layouts of car window permits and milk carton nutrition tables, giving track titles, launch dates and copyright lines their own dedicated containers. Gates, a neo-grotesque typeface from Contextype, holds the editorial frame together.
Creative director Erik Herrström sums up the brief in a single image: “We wanted to create an identity that feels as fresh as that first sip of your favourite milkshake that you just picked up going through the drive-through.”
What makes this one useful for independent teams is the discipline of it. The studio did not invent a story and drape it over the client; it found the story the client was already living — demos judged from the driver’s seat — and gave it a system that scales. A small studio rebranding a growing client faces the same temptation every time: to make the work bigger than the business. Herrström did the opposite, and the identity is stronger for it.
Source: Design Week, published October 14, 2026, updated October 28, 2026.