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The Power of Three Makes The Comp24 Group a Force In Packaging Comp Heroes

The Comp24 Group worked closely with Cadbury-Schweppes during their entire core diet soft drink redesign project completed this year. This mockup was used to build a photograph library for all Sunkist retail signage and point-of-sale merchandising.

By Debora Toth

What do you have when you merge together three of the leading producers of high-quality comps, packaging prototypes, heroes, props, sales samples and color correction with over 80 years of experience in the industry? You have a strong coast-to-coast service-oriented firm known as The Comp 24 Group.

In May of 2006, AdProps, an Atlanta-based firm specializing in solutions for packaging, mockups, and comps, and Dennis Curtin Studio, a Los Angeles-based an industry leader specializing in producing heroes, comps, props, and color correction, joined forces with The Comp24 Group headquartered in New York City and Los Angeles. The combination of these three firms represents high-quality package development process for the best-known brands in the country, and their work is seen on television and print advertising on a daily basis.

"We were good before but we're even better now," exclaims Ken Wasserman, president of The Comp24 Group. "The acquisitions of AdProps and Dennis Curtin give us the combined expertise of the three largest comping companies in the U.S. This gives us the ability to better serve our national clientele."

The new firm now has a national reach with locations in Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, and Chicago but continues its strong local personalized, high-quality service and quick turnaround. In fact, each firm will continue to operate individually with its own name due to its strong customer-centric reputation. Together, the three firms have almost a century of experience producing packaging prototypes for most of the world's largest makers of consumer products.

"We have similar capabilities," says Randy Perkinson, president of the Atlanta division. "But we have our own strengths and specialties. As we move forward together, we're going to work to mirror those capabilities among all of the locations and add services for our clientele."

Every year Comp24 makes "heroes," or the star packages, for many of the most watched TV spots of the broadcast year. The firm is proud to be chosen to do so many high profile ads. For example, the Super Bowl game carries Comp24's heroes for such well-known products as Budweiser, Pepsi-Cola, and Pizza Hut. Other comp products can be seen in spots for MiracleGro, Nescafé Taster's Choice, Hershey's Kisses, Crate & Barrel, and Garnier Fructis shampoo.

A digital transformation

In providing the highest-quality, most realistic product comps, the firm turns a client's digital file into a 3D color-correct comp on their desk in about three days (the normal turnaround time). Working with such packaging shapes as bottles, tubes, cans, boxes, and bags, the company is able to apply its skill and know-how to a variety of materials. The highly trained staff gives individual attention to each project and customizes the various printing techniques to create the best color-correct comp.

The company offers its own unique packaging products. For example, "indestructo" is a flexible packaging process printed on foil or clear film. Developed for many years in the firm's research and development department, indestructo allows the client to handle or mishandle the packaging without any fear of the ink chipping or flaking.

Folding carton comps can be produced on any carton stock in multiple colors from one to a thousand. The carton comps can be foil-stamped, embossed, hand or digitally die-cut and glued, as well as loaded with the product if need be. Six different printing processes are available including silk screen, a high-quality hand-printing process, and digital on the firm's Indigo, Kodak Approval, Nexpress, HP, or Roland machines. The high-quality printing process available from the firm is a hand-printing process called Direct Imaging, where the emulsion and ink are printed directly on the substrate. All the film used for this process is produced in-house for quality control.

"Hand printing is very labor intensive," explains Maria Hagin, director of national sales and marketing based out of Atlanta's AdProps. "This process produces the highest quality possible. We're not limited in the number of colors available to us. We can use special match colors, metallic, opaque, or translucent. The color is exact. The process is so flexible that it can be used to produce high quality comps for TV and print, yet accurately represent production quality packaging."

This comp was developed for an advertising agency producing a SuperBowl television commercial ahead of the package's debut. Often the tricky part on comps like this is distorting a flat digital file correctly to produce a perfectly accurate comp that is indistinguishable from a real package.

Coca-Cola package designers worked with The Comp 24 Group for six months on the recent Powerade Option launch. Comp 24 was instrumental in both tweaking the design for final production and for producing this perfect comp for print advertising photography.

A brief history of comps

Who are these individual firms that have such strong reputations in the field? Comp24 was established in 1983 with three employees who silk-screened book covers for the publishing industry. As they worked in the backroom of a typesetting company, the firm began building its reputation for reliable quality printing.

Within three short years, the firm had grown to 15 people and moved to an independent 10,000-square-foot facility. By having the foresight to incorporate computers into their production flow, Comp24 achieved a strong early jump on competitors in the field of short-run custom comps. Comp24 became known as the first studio to use computers to create color separations for silkscreen and direct image printing.

By 1997, Comp24 had expanded its staff to 45 employees and began 24-hour operations, offering service nationwide. A year later, sales offices opened in Los Angeles and Chicago to serve a growing account list. Additional acquisitions combined Comp24 with Speed Comp—another New York-based comp house. To better serve a growing West Coast market, the Los Angeles Office was expanded into a production facility.

In 2005, Comp24 was purchased by Merisel, a leading provider of visual communications and brand imaging solutions to the consumer products, retail, advertising, and entertainment industries. Today, Comp24 is the largest producer of comps for initial presentations and color-corrected "hero" packages for TV, or anything in between.

For nearly 30 years, AdProps has supplied packaging mock-ups and comps to consumer product companies and their agencies. Established in 1977, AdProps is an Atlanta-based commercial prototype company providing consumer products companies and advertising agencies with prototypes, sales samples, props, and color-corrected television packaging. The 28-employee firm located in a 20,000-square-foot facility in midtown Atlanta also provides clients with other end-to-end complementary services for file editing and film separation. Known in the industry for "Bringing Form to Ideas," the talented team at AdProps works with the latest technologies to offer the best solutions for packaging, mockup, and comp needs.

The Dennis Curtin Studio established its business in the Los Angeles region for the last 30 years as an industry leader specializing in producing heroes, comps, props, and color correction. Its repertoire of services includes modelmaking, design, and retouching. Dennis Curtin offers generic products, prototypes, signage, packaging, oversized or miniature props, and promotional pieces. With over 30 years of experience in the industry, Dennis Curtin can accommodate every client need. Since its offices were only 15 miles away from Comp24's offices, Dennis Curtin Studio's employees and sales staff were recently merged into Comp24's Burbank offices.

Timothy Parzyck, director of Comp24 LA studio, sums it up: "It's great to see the synergy that's happening with all of these great companies coming together. The combined expertise and technology not only makes The Comp24 Group stronger, it also bodes well for the client. A better product at a better price—what client wouldn't like that?"

The Ben Gay project challenged The Comp24 Group to produce an ideal package for print advertising. They had to rebuild the client's digital files in a format where they could separate channels and fine tune the color levels.

Innovation and marketing

With their years of experience in hand, the firm has seen a distinct recent trend that packaging has become more innovative. "We're seeing the use of holographic substrates and inks that glow in the dark," says Perkinson. "We're also working with a lot of unique substrates and shapes. We can produce anything that our clients can imagine, but we will raise a red flag if it won't work in production. We don't just take a job and produce exactly what is provided; we coordinate with our clients to make sure we satisfy their needs. Our ultimate goal is to be their partner."

The firm's apropos motto is: "Visualize + materialize = realize." Ultimately, the firm is helping its clients to make the best marketing decisions to help their products sell to the consumer.

"Today, we work with our client's design firm on comps from the initial design stage all the way through to the production stage," says Hagin. "We help them spot potential design and print production problems early in the process before they can cause real set backs. This helps them save time and money, especially in today's world when they are revising their designs more often. We've been told that one of our clients (one of the largest soda manufacturers in the world) will be revising their designs every two to three weeks. This is certainly a challenge we welcome."

The firm's client service managers act as the "eyes and ears" of the customer throughout the entire project. It's not uncommon for these client service managers to go afield, as far away as France, Brazil, or South Africa, to attend to the client's comps. "We go the extra mile," says Hagin. "We challenge ourselves everyday."