SPOTLIGHT: Food & Beverage

Legacy Chocolates’ Truffle Box Is So Entertaining And Useful, You May Not Want to Throw It Away

When David Brier, president of the DBD International design firm, started patronizing the small Legacy Chocolates store in Menomonie, WI, he saw great potential for sales of the reasonably priced gourmet chocolate truffles he loved. The sky was the limit with a bold new design, he thought. Convincing the owner of the store was another issue, even with persistent prodding.

Michael Roberts, the nearly obsessive owner of the Legacy brand and self-appointed “Purveyor of Chocolate,” was reluctant to invest capital on a new design that he considered mostly superfluous, and resisted the notion for two years. Like many brand owners, he felt more or less that “it doesn’t matter what the package is. It’s the quality of what is inside that matters.”

Today, Roberts is singing a different tune about his redesigned box. “It’s unbelievable how much difference it makes,” admits Roberts. “You need the image.” The resulting package was a combination of Roberts’ passion and Brier’s flare, and had an immediate and dramatic impact on in-store and online sales.

When Roberts gave the green light to Brier, Brier was determined to reinvent the chocolate box concept completely, and asked himself: “How do we sidestep the cliché issues?” The previous Legacy box was a typical thin, mostly white, flat box with pictures of truffles on the outside.

Legacy Chocolates successfully goes against chocolate box clichés with an abundance of information both outside and inside.

Brier had witnessed Roberts’ passion firsthand from many observations of Roberts in the store. “He was so passionate about his chocolate, he would talk for four minutes without taking a breath,” remembers Brier. Roberts agreed with Brier that the package could reflect his educational goal and be entertaining at the same time, and Brier ran with the idea. “I want words all over the place,” Roberts remembers telling Brier, and Brier happily complied.

Brier challenged himself to increase the brand presence even further. “The goal became: Create a box so beautiful, timeless, and informational that the mere concept of throwing the box away, once it was empty, would cause emotional turmoil,” explains Brier. A sturdy, deep, attractive box, they figured, could be used to store household items, bills, cards, etc. and become part of the consumer’s home.

In addition to the standard product information, the box contains numerous—and actually quite interesting—sound bites about high quality chocolate and what makes it high quality. The box explains that the rich and robust Legacy Chocolate truffles are fresh (never more than 30 days old) and made from fine Venezuelan cocoa, fresh cream, fresh butter, and absolutely no corn syrup.

The box emphasizes the distinction between real chocolate, freshly made like Legacy’s, and “fast” chocolate, often made with corn syrup and made to sit on shelves for an extended period of time. Other passages on the box include factoids, trivia, quotes, inspirational axioms, and morsels of chocolate history. A couple of messages warn of serious consequences of converting over to real chocolate: “You may not be able to go back” and “May cause chocolate envy....share responsibly.”

The box itself is E-Flute corrugated board, which is sturdy but lightweight. The entire box is printed with four-color process, a match blue, and an overall varnish. The craft paper look is actually a four-color replication of craft paper, to create an effect that is not too polished, what Brier calls “blatant subtlety.”

Brier also wanted an overall feel of old-world Europe, possibly with an Italian sensibility. The Legacy Chocolate brand name achieves that with a custom type treatment devised by DBD for Legacy. The unusual color combination came from Brier’s gut feeling about what would appeal to women boutique shoppers. The blue color was found to have an immediate and electric appeal to test subjects (family and friends), and the complete package has seen triple digit sales increases.