Code 643 is a chain of grocery stores with cafés, owned by a state ministry, built for small and remote towns where there is little in the way of everyday urban comfort. Beyond work and home, these shops-with-cafés were meant to become a third place. The task for the identity was to combine the brand’s institutional, orderly character with the warmth and comfort those towns lack. Wave built the brand platform and identity, plus storefront windows, in-store navigation, the interior, product labels and staff workwear. The visual metaphor borrowed the logic of neat, ordered rows — columns, rhombuses, straight lines — but built them, playfully, out of food silhouettes: ice-cream cones, loaves and other products lining up to mark the different departments of the store. Rendered in a bright, tasty, cheerful palette, the contrast between that crisp, orderly motif and the cozy, appetizing food world became the chain’s calling card.
