Beautiful Journeys

Seattle's Kendall Ross Design Firm
Artfully Crafts Authentic Brand Stories

By Ron Romanik

After Kendall Ross identified key market factors and market demographics for the specialty beer market, they developed a brand persona of casual fun and good times that reflect the idea of "resort" style living.

When David Kendall and Tim Ross started working together on retail design projects some years ago, each recognized similarities in their approach to solving retail problems. Among other shared traits, they both had a passion for bringing something new to the consumer experience. Experts in building brands for retail destinations and consumer packaged goods, both Kendall and Ross had a similar conviction that a successful retail experience should set up an appealing journey for the customer.

Seven years ago, Kendall and Ross decided they had something new to offer to retail design, so they established Kendall Ross in the heart of Seattle's retail core. They have seen steady growth through strong and lean markets, and the firm has grown to 12 full-time staffers. The firm tackles branding, packaging, retail environments, and brand-related communications exclusively for retail companies, often ones experiencing substantial growth or ones in a transitional phase.

Kendall believes they have assembled a core group of very experienced experts that have a wide breadth of collective retail branding and consumer goods packaging knowledge. The firm's talent is understanding packaging not only from the customer's perspective of a packaged product, but also in the particular environments where it might live. In an office with no walls, the staff's individual responsibilities have similarly undefined boundaries. "We think that the more ideas we can generate from as many sources in the office, the better the creative will be," says Ross.

Retail shopping as a journey

Kendall explains that the firm continually builds on their retail experience and applies it—without too much trouble—to package design. "A lot of retail environment design is really about analyzing a customer's journey as they move through a space," he stresses. Kendall says this journey can be broken down and analyzed piece by piece, and it can have smaller mini-journeys. "What we like to do is really organize the customer around their journey through the packaging and it's environment," Kendall says.

Kendall further explains that making this journey work for the customer is not only a matter of organizing a hierarchy of information on a package. A designer must also consider how shoppers approach a package on the shelf and how they interact with that package, and then design a package that sets up shoppers for a specific kind of experience. "For me as a creative, being able to direct and influence that experience is very rewarding," Kendall says.

Ross takes pride in the staff's expertise in understanding the retail shoppers' motivations as well as retailers' mindsets. The firm's downtown Seattle location is in the heart of a bustling retail district. Ross observes that the staff spends a great deal of time searching the streets and shops in the area. Not only are they spotting trends or researching category leaders, they are also talking to store managers to gain more insight into what products are moving, the role of packaging in sales, and what else customers are talking about or asking for.

Kendall admires brands that have clearly understood a demographic, and he tries to learn from those brands and what they have successfully done to become a part of consumers' lives. He explains that oftentimes brand managers say that they want to target upscale, but they can't identify or understand what that actually means. With the 2006 Makeover Challenge project of redesigning Fresh Body Market packages, for instance, Kendall thinks the firm did a great job of stripping the brand down to its most refined simplicity, then elevating it to a luxurious, pampering experience.

Ross explains that a key part of the design process is taking the customer's mindset and trying to understand their motivation, or what they are trying to do or achieve by purchasing a product or package. "There's a reason that they're buying things, there's a reason that they're going places, and our firm looks at what are those reasons," Ross says.

Kendall Ross begins with a pretty specific customer profile, or profiles, that help direct design ideas, and then always asks: "Does that design solution connect with that profile?"

Crafting customer profiles

Ross says that the firm always brings the customer experience to the forefront of the design process, because building a brand is about building a lasting experience throughout a customer's contact with the package. "What we're really doing is looking for ways to please the customer, and really create an experience that is relevant to their lives," says Ross.

The first step in the process is defining the target customer for a product and package. Because many of Kendall Ross clients have high-end or boutique products, they can be pretty specific about the "customer profile" they develop. Part of this process is a combination of what they have learned from visiting stores, researching "indicators" of the past, tracking fashion or design cycles over five or 10 years, determining who is the industry trendsetter, looking at innovative packaging, or discovering who is simply connecting with consumers the best.

After a great deal of information gathering and research, the firm constructs several profiles of the certain types of customers that they are targeting. Sometimes they give these customers names that suggest their characteristics or personalities, and sometimes they focus on just one prototypical customer. Ross believes that their process is very holistic in understanding the psychographics of these target customers, mapping out what habits, desires, or values apply to certain types of people.

These findings are often organized in brand spectrums and visual persona studies of consumer aspirations or behavior. Typical spectrums might be "historical vs. trend-driven" or "luxury vs. value." Ross concurs that spectrums are very useful in repositioning brands, "to create an evolution as well as a revolution."

Kendall usually returns to a question that he believes is fundamental: "What kind of experience do we want to set the customer up for?" Kendall credits their talented staff with developing useful profile statements that identify key aspects of each prototypical customer. When design proposals are considered, Kendall always asks another fundamental question: "Does that design solution connect with that profile?"

Business agility defined

The Kendall Ross design firm won the 2006 Package Design Makeover Challenge with Fresh Body Market packaging (left) that communicated sensuality and a pampering experience. Tim Ross (above left) and David Kendall (above right) believe that it is important to understand a target shopper's motivations in order to set them up for a specific experience.

David Kendall and Tim Ross feel their business is ideal for the retail climate of today. The focused staff keeps the firm agile and allows them to concentrate on what they do best—retail solutions. The firm calls on their many familiar front-end and back-end partners to provide additional specialties while remaining focused on what they do best.

"We call in experts in the areas we don't want to support internally," says Ross. "We call upon firms with that back-end expertise to help augment what we can do on the front end to make our back end more efficient. And we bring that to our client as part of our solution."

The firm also calls in partners in different disciplines of consumer research to help them test-market designs. Of course, the ultimate test is the marketplace, which they try to tap as often as possible with small or regional packaging releases. The purpose of most research, Ross says, is trying to confirm if the gut instincts of the staff have relevance out in the real world.

However, research can only tell a designer or client so much. Kendall calls his staff members the "ultimate skeptics" who question every claim or premise of a research study. Ross calls it unpackaging the research or scraping away layers to understand consumer motivations. "You bring something else to the data," Ross explains. "We ask the 'why' questions that make sense to clients."

Kendall believes their position as outside experts for their clients' companies makes for productive relationships. This allows Kendall Ross to get to the core of the product or brand and effectively augment brand managers' ideas. "A lot of times our office serves as an advocate for the customer," explains Kendall.

Made In Washington Brand Extension Program

When the Made in Washington coffee brand wanted to create the premium Roasted in Seattle line, Kendall Ross tried to incorporate knowledge they gleaned from the firm's projects in other categories—namely, wine bottles. As they had done with Tully's brand of gourmet coffee, they brought a style of wine tasting notes into coffee packaging. To entice coffee aficionados, there should be education about how coffee bean flavor varies in subtle nuances according to soil, weather conditions, latitude, etc.

In Seattle coffee boutique stores, as much as 80% of the shoppers could be tourists, so there also needed to be an allure of an authentic Seattle story that the tourists can take back home with them. Kendall Ross knew they could tell an interesting story with Roasetd in Seattle and impart the brand with an air of quiet sophistication. "Sometimes the simple, subtle messages are the strongest," says Kendall.

One thing Made in Washington already had was an established and recognizable silver bag, and Kendall Ross decided that silver's association with premium was something they could leverage to their advantage. The firm moved away from the previous homemade white labels into clear laminate film over the silver bags, and added catchy flavor names, whimsical illustrations for each varietal, and succinct flavor details.

PORTLOCK PURE CATCH Brand Extension Program

With the recent Portlock brand extension program, the design process was complicated by having two business objectives. The owner of the brand, NorQuest Seafoods, was entering a new retail, mass distribution market space, and they also wanted to present a new Portlock Pure Catch sub-brand as an upscale, lifestyle brand that was in tune with the trend of creating quality meals in little time.

Kendall explains that the firm narrowed the objectives to communicating two main benefits of the product—healthy and convenient. The firm considered every detail in conveying the easy-to-prepare message as quickly and clearly as possible. Kendall believes the table photography is the first touch point to reflect convenience by offering delectable but not extravagant serving suggestions. "An 'ideal idea' helps them aspire," says Kendall, "It helps them see what's possible. Our packaging leads them to that end process or end product."

The choice of packaging material was also fundamental to the convenience message. The sealable pouch was more cost-effective and also fit into current manufacturing practices. But more importantly, Ross explains: "If we put it in a typical paperboard box, that would send the wrong message that it was already prepared." Elevating the brand out of the typical box milieu was topped off with the bold, saturated color palette for the three SKUs. At first the team thought the colors might be over-the-top bright, but testing them in real freezer environments quickly changed their mind due to the visual impact in the confined space.

JAKE'S BARBEQUE SAUCE Brand Redesign Program

When Jake's Barbecue Sauce came to Kendall Ross, the brand owners had a niche brand that they wanted to evolve into a more widely distributed "big brand." The first question to explore was: "What does a big brand look like?" In the sauce category, the trend is to develop a compelling story and even bring geography and culture into the mix. But most important, thought Kendall Ross, was that the story be "authentic." More consumers today are interested in knowing what is behind the product or brand, and they want to understand the producer's story. The next question was: "What does 'authentic' look like?"

The firm presented Jake's with spectrums of options—from conservative to more edgy, from "close-in" to "challenging," "different," or "larger." Kendall Ross also looked at changing the brand identity to help reposition the product. Much discussion centered on what parts of the original identity they could push around and move to a different profile. At first, the client liked one that was very different, but have since moved back to be a bit more conservative, landing on the design the firm labeled "Authentic." Everyone agreed that this design reflects the barbecue sauce's unique recipe and the unique person behind it.