Hudson's Bay Logo History: Coat of Arms, Stripes and 2013 Wordmark

A coat of arms at the start of Hudson’s Bay logo history

On May 2, 1670, a royal charter from King Charles II created The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson’s Bay. The coat of arms followed in the company’s early years. It is the oldest layer of the Hudson’s Bay logo and, for centuries, the firm’s main image.

The shield is silver with a red cross, the cross of Saint George, between four black beavers, each beaver a stand-in for the fur trade. Above sits a fox on a red cap trimmed with ermine, and two elk-like animals hold the shield. The Canadian Heraldic Authority registered the arms in 2017, long after they first appeared.

Below the shield runs the motto Pro pelle cutem, usually translated as a pelt for a skin. It is a play on a line from the Book of Job, skin for skin. As a joke about the fur trade it is darker than it first sounds, and few retail brands have ever carried a pun quite that old.

The multistripe blanket as a second logo

The most recognized part of the Hudson’s Bay logo history is not a logo at all. It is a blanket. The company’s posts were the main source of woollen blankets from the 1670s, and the first definite record of an order for 500 point blankets dates to 1779. The blankets were made in England.

The points are short lines woven into the edge that show the blanket’s size, so traders could judge it at a glance. The first documented order for a multistripe blanket dates to 1798, and that order listed red, blue, green and yellow. The modern sequence of green, red, yellow and indigo settled in the mid to late 1800s.

The colours were long called Queen Anne colours, though they were never hers officially. They were fashionable, easily produced dyes of her era. You do not need to know any of that to recognize the stripes, and that is the point. For two centuries the pattern did the job of a logo without a single letter in it.

The Bay and the evolution of the wordmark

Before 1965 the company wrote its name in a blackletter script, the heavy Gothic lettering of old documents. That year the department stores were rebranded the Bay, with a simple modern logo built around a stylized letter B. The new name was shorter, friendlier and much easier to fit on a shopping bag than the full corporate title.

The evolution touched other stores too. Morgan’s, a Quebec department store chain the company owned, used a matching M logo from 1969 until its stores became the Bay in 1972. For about four decades the Bay was simply what Canadians called the store, and the corporate name lived on mostly in annual reports and on the blankets.

The 2013 revival of the Hudson’s Bay logo

On March 6, 2013, the company launched a rebranding campaign that changed the store name from the Bay to Hudson’s Bay. The new logo restored the coat of arms, redrawn by the illustrator Mark Summers in black and white, with the line Hudson’s Bay Company Incorporated 2 May 1670 set beneath it. It was history used on purpose.

In practice the wordmark did most of the work. The Hudson’s Bay wordmark went on all public-facing material, while the full arms were kept for limited occasions. Observers compared the lettering with the typeface used by Burberry, a sign of where the store wanted to sit. The Vancouver flagship had already shown the new logo in December 2012.

The 2013 Hudson’s Bay logo held for twelve years, a fairly long run by retail standards. It mixed a heritage symbol with a calm serif wordmark, black on white, and let the multistripe colours provide the brightness. Placed beside the decade-by-decade data in the brand colours report, it looks deliberately restrained for its period.

2025: creditor protection and the end of the stores

On March 7, 2025, the company filed for creditor protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act. Within days it warned that all 80 Hudson’s Bay stores could be liquidated without new financing. An Ontario court approved the liquidation of 74 of them on March 21, and clearance sales began on March 24, 2025.

Six stronger stores were spared at first. In April 2025 the company announced that every remaining store would be liquidated, after its adviser told the court a buyer was unlikely. All Hudson’s Bay stores closed permanently by June 1, 2025. More than 8,000 employees were laid off, nearly 90 per cent of the workforce, ending a run of 355 years.

Who holds the Hudson’s Bay logo history now

On May 15, 2025, Canadian Tire announced it would buy the company’s intellectual property for 30 million dollars, a sale the court approved in June. The deal covered the name, logos, coat of arms and stripes. The old company changed its own name to a numbered company by August 2025, to avoid confusion with the trademark.

The buyer has its own visual record, traced in the Canadian Tire logo history, and it started with the stripes. In October 2025 Canadian Tire said it would sell Hudson’s Bay point blankets in its stores. The last of eight auctions of the old company’s artifacts closed on July 2, 2026.

The evolution of this identity runs from heraldry to textile to type. Few famous logos have survived the business they belonged to, and the stripes may be the clearest case in Canada. As of October 2026, the question is whether Canadian Tire will ever put the 2013 Hudson’s Bay logo back on a storefront.