Zappos at Work - Sara Zamora

Zappos at Work

Brand Identity

Overview

The Problem

Zappos at Work is a division of Zappos focused on selling safety footwear to companies for their employees. While the parent brand was well established, Zappos at Work operated like a startup — no identity, no clear sense of who it was. The challenge wasn't just building a brand from scratch. It was building one that could stand next to Zappos without being swallowed by it, while speaking to an audience that couldn't be more different from Zappos' core customer.

The Discovery

Zappos' primary audience is women shopping for fashion. Zappos at Work serves older men in industrial work environments. Understanding that gap required more than assumption — I conducted surveys, joined sales calls, and visited our client on-site to see firsthand what that environment actually looked like and what kind of person we were designing for. What I found was that the voice could stay consistent with Zappos' brand personality, but the visual identity needed to shift — harder, more grounded, more masculine.

The Strategy

The strategic decision was to preserve what made Zappos recognizable — its values, its tone, its personality — while building a visual system that felt native to the industrial environment it was entering. Navy replaced lifestyle color palettes. Messaging leaned practical and direct. Zappos' 10 core values remained the foundation, ensuring the brand stayed anchored to the parent company at its core while carving out a distinct identity on the surface.

The Outcome

The result was a brand that could live in both worlds — recognizably Zappos, but built for a completely different room. The system was applied across flyers, posters, banners, mailers, merchandise, and presentations, giving the team a cohesive identity they could deploy consistently.

With the brand established, the next challenge was bringing it into a physical space. Zappos at Work was opening its first brick-and-mortar location in Las Vegas — a store designed to do several things at once: showcase the brand, host marketing events, welcome B2B partners, and give visitors a reason to feel something when they walked in.

As design lead I was responsible for the full store concept, presenting to stakeholders through multiple rounds of iteration until the vision was aligned. The budget tightened as the project progressed, which meant making hard decisions about what to prioritize and what to plan for later. That constraint pushed the design toward its essentials — every element that made the final cut had to earn its place.

Two details I'm most proud of: the gear wall, conceptualized as a nod to teamwork — one of Zappos at Work's core values — and the custom shoelace wallpaper illustrated for the store entrance. Both were designed to give the space a personality that felt specific to Zappos at Work rather than generic retail.

The store launched as the brand's first physical presence, functional from day one and built with room to grow.

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