A book from from an industry veteran on the principles of jewelry display, image, layout and planning. Author Larry B. Johnson takes you through every facet of creating and maintaining effective jewelry ...
By Joe DiPalma
It's one thing to develop branding for one product. It's quite another to develop an umbrella brand design for 40 feet of store space. When it 's complicated by a line that features both licensed and unlicensed products—and when each product in the line must tell its own individual story while at the same time allowing the consumer to recognize the brand —it takes more than just a team of designers. It takes a team of major league problem-solvers.
Packaging a story
At Atomica Design Group, we like to think of ourselves as just that: a crack team of problem-solvers, but when a customer approached us with the scenario I 've just described, it left us scratching our heads for a little while. We've faced some pretty tall orders in our nine years in the industry, but this multi-faceted problem was the tallest order yet, and it left us with the following long list of questions.
• How do we tell the client's story with the packaging?
• How do we create a cohesive line of many products, packaging sizes and styles and ensure that it looks like it all comes from the same company?
• How do we make sure that the consumer—who has a long, trusting relationship to the established brand—does not lose faith in the brand in its new, redesigned guise? After all, brand integrity isn't something any client wants to lose. How could we keep it intact?
• How could we design a program that held together, while at the same time allow each product to stand out from the competition and catch the consumer's eye? And how could we give every SKU a clear, concise message under the umbrella?
• The client had presented us with a variety of different boxes, blister packs and packaging structures. Would our design team be able to find an element to link them all?
• As if all this wasn't complicated enough, the umbrella branding had to work across properties from major licensors including Disney, Marvel, and Nickelodeon, each with its own distinctive style and consumer expectations. And of course, each licensor had its own style guide requirements that needed to be met. What could we do to factor this into the equation?
Sketching out ideas
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