Samsung's Old Logos: 55 Years of Three Stars

The blue oval is so completely fused with the name Samsung that it's hard to imagine the company ever wearing another face. And yet people keep typing "Samsung old logo" into search bars — usually after spotting a strange three-star badge on the back of a vintage TV, or on a storefront sign in an old family photo.

This is the story of those stars. For 55 years before the blue oval arrived in 1993, Samsung's face was three stars. Why three, why stars, how they survived half a century, and why they vanished all at once. The story starts somewhere unexpected: a package of noodles.

1938: Samsung's first logo was on a noodle wrapper

In 1938, in the city of Daegu, founder Lee Byung-chul opened Samsung Trading Company. Forget the semiconductor empire — the first businesses were noodle making and trading in dried fish and produce. The noodles sold under the brand "Star Brand Noodles."

The mark on that wrapper, as the records describe it, is a small delight: an oval containing three stars and stalks of wheat. The stars stood for the company's name, the wheat for what was inside the package. Product and company pressed into one little picture. This wasn't branding theory; it was the oldest reason logos exist — so a customer who couldn't read could still pick your noodles out of the market stall by the stars.

And here's the twist worth flagging early. In 1993 Samsung would famously abandon its stars for a blue oval. But look again at 1938: the first mark was already an oval. Samsung's logo history isn't a journey from stars to oval — it's a journey from stars inside an oval to an oval without the stars.

Why three stars? The name itself is the logo

Samsung (삼성, 三星) literally means "three stars." In Korean tradition, the number three carries the sense of bigness, abundance, and strength; a star is something bright that burns forever. The founder's wish, as it has been passed down, fits in one sentence: be as large, as powerful, and as eternal as the stars in the sky.

So the three stars weren't decoration. They were the name, drawn. That's the kind of logo we rate highly at Markive — the story comes from inside the company's own name, not from the fashion of the moment. When we wrote about the Kia logo, we found the same pattern: Kia (起亞) carries "rising out of Asia" in its characters. Korea's founding generation of industrialists tended to draw half the logo the moment they named the company.

Fifty-five years of three stars. The red markers are the poles of this story: born in 1938, retired in 1993.

1969: the stars meet the alphabet

Through the postwar decades Samsung grew into a manufacturing group — sugar in 1953, textiles in 1954 — in an era when Korean companies had no concept of corporate identity at all. Affiliates each ran their own marks; the idea of one regulated logo speaking for a whole group came much later. The stars persisted anyway, carried along less by a brand manual than by habit and affection.

The turning point came in 1969, with the founding of Samsung Electronics. The logo used from 1969 to 1979 put the English word SAMSUNG beside the three stars for the first time. An exporter's logo has to be legible beyond its borders. As the company mass-produced black-and-white TVs and pushed into world markets, that lockup became the starting point of the Samsung typography we know today. Chinese characters became a picture, and the picture now stood beside the alphabet — a staircase nearly every Korean exporter of that generation climbed.

The 1980s: polished stars, semiconductor ambitions

From 1980 to 1992 the mark was a geometrically refined set of three stars paired with SAMSUNG. A modest visual update — carrying an immodest decade. In 1983 the founder declared, from Tokyo, that Samsung would enter the semiconductor business. The company was rebuilding itself from an appliance maker into a technology company.

Which set up a familiar tension: the company was transforming while its logo still carried 1938 on its back. A mark born on a noodle wrapper was now selling memory chips. We described the same widening gap in the Kia story — the cars changed while the badge stayed behind. When the distance between a company and its mark stretches far enough, a rebrand stops being a question of if.

1993: the day the stars went out

In June 1993, chairman Lee Kun-hee delivered his "New Management" declaration in Frankfurt — the famous "change everything except your wife and children" speech. The new logo was that declaration made visible. American identity firm Lippincott & Margulies spent roughly two years on the work, producing the blue oval the world now knows: tilted slightly upward to suggest ascent, with open strokes in the S and G to suggest a company open to the world.

The rebrand wasn't a decoration on New Management; it was one of its sharpest tools. A promise to improve quality is invisible. A new logo shows up instantly on every product, sign, and business card, and it tells the whole organization there is no going back. Repainting every sign on earth was the cost of making the change irreversible.

The boldest decision wasn't the blue or the oval — it was deleting the stars. Retiring a 55-year-old founding symbol is not done lightly. But the three stars, rich with meaning at home, were a mute shape abroad, and a company betting on One Samsung needed a single mark that read identically everywhere. What remained when the stars left was the name itself: seven letters, SAMSUNG. What happened next — how that blue oval spent three decades becoming one of the most-seen logos on earth — continues in our Samsung logo history.

Want to see the old marks themselves? Logos belong to their brands — Markive doesn't republish them, but here's the official source: Samsung's brand heritage archive, where the company documents its own logo history, noodle era included.

MARKIVE View

Searches for Samsung's old logo are half nostalgia, half disbelief — this colossus really did start with a noodle stamp, and that stamp's stars really did survive fifty-five years. Two lessons for anyone who reads logos.

First, a logo's lifespan is set by the strength of its story, not the polish of its form. The three stars were never fashionable, but they were welded to the name, and that held for half a century. Second, deletion is part of a logo's history too. Samsung earned its oval by giving up its stars — and after 2005 it would go on to erase even the oval, leaving only the letters. Keeping, refining, and finally letting go: that is the full life cycle of a mark. And note what Samsung does with its retired marks today: it archives them proudly on an official heritage page. A brand that can exhibit its own past is a brand that trusts its present.

Read the logo, Markive!

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