Häagen-Dazs rebrands for an aesthetically-led millennial audience

Matthew Carlton

Premium ice-cream Häagen-Dazs turned around a sales slump with a packaging redesign aimed at attracting millennial consumers back to the brand.

Many consumers erroneously assume, given the name, that ice-cream brand Häagen-Dazs is Danish or German. But it was actually created by a man called Reuben Mattus, a Polish immigrant to New York where he spent his teenage years and his early twenties in the 1950s and 60s working in an ice-cream store. When he decided to create his own ice-cream brand, he paid homage to Scandinavia because his grandparents had been rescued by a Danish family during the war – hence the name.

“So we always talk about the brand as being Brooklyn born but with Scandinavian aspirations,” Gini Sharvill,...

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