Perennial, Inc.
Toronto, Ontario • www.perennialinc.com

Left to right: Jennifer Ireland, senior designer, creative; Richard Patmore, senior designer, creative; Gary Oakley, vice president, creative; Chris Sutton, senior designer, creative.

Perennial Inc. is a 17-year-old, multidisciplinary design firm that draws on the diverse talents and wide experiences of its staff when approaching any retail or package design assignment. Gary Oakley, vice president of creative, has spent the last four years of his 20 years in the industry at Perennial and appreciates the agility of the Perennial design atmosphere.

"We're pretty diverse ethnology-wise," explains Oakley. For each project, team members are selected for their pertinent experience and are challenged to push themselves to maximize the brand experience. "It's also important to listen and watch," Oakley says.

Perennial also encourages its designers to travel around the world in order to widen their horizons. Oakley feels that an awareness of what is going at retail in other countries can be an immeasurable asset when approaching new design projects. The firm encourages diversity by encouraging cross-pollination of ideas and trends from designer to designer and from category to category.

Perennial has experience in all aspects of retail design, from visual brand identity, to product development, to retail store design. This experience gives the company a unique ability to design packages with a full understanding of the impact of the retail environment on the visibility of a package in stores. Armed with this understanding on every project, Perennial is able to create a targeted design that stands out on-shelf.

Oakley says Perennial is constantly searching for "better ways of understanding what consumers go through during a purchasing decision." Oakley observes that typical retail environments have been evolving rapidly in recent years, especially in terms of product visibility. On retail shelves, categories have become broader with more varieties of brand and product selections. Both the breadth and depth of categories have increased, so packaging must now work harder to stake out its space on the shelf.

Another trend that Perennial is responding to is the fact that often the real design "client" is not the brand owner, but the retail store chains who make the decisions that can make or break a brand with more or better shelf placings. The trick is to invent something new while serving the expectations of a client as well as store shoppers, who are used to a certain kind of experience when visiting a particular type of store.

Perennial built the core of its clientele on the premise that "Good design is good for business." Clients often provide them with a lot of information from their research and history, but Perennial filters out what is useful. "Consumer research is a validation of what you're doing," says Oakley. "It shouldn't be a driver of what you're doing."

Of course, none of this prevents Perennial from trying to stay one step ahead of the client and their situation, or prevents them from seeking inventive solutions. As Oakley says, Perennial's package design projects often lead them to see the big picture and to ask themselves: "How much can we influence the stores?"