Summit Brands Banks on Bottle Shapes To Unify New Identity

Over the past few years, Kornick Lindsay, a design innovation and development firm in Chicago, has been working with Summit Brands to evolve their packaging for a more modern appeal with improved benefit communication. In the past year, Kornick Lindsay has helped the company forge a new identity and introduce a structure strategy that will redefine the company's place in the market mainstream.

Summit Brands was formerly known as Iron Out Inc. (since 1958), a manufacturer of household cleaning products that solve tough problems. The company's flagship product is still Super Iron Out, a rust stain remover for household cleaning and laundry. As today's consumer is becoming highly image- conscious, the company saw the need for a new name and identity. Summit Brands was chosen as the new name for a simple, memorable, easy to pronounce, and universal enough for international markets.

Kornick Lindsay was tasked with creating a new identity to effectively communicate the company's new and modern path. The new elegant logo has a stylized mountain symbol that visualizes the new name. A neutral gray base is highlighted with a bright red accent for contemporary brand appeal, completed with clean, modern typography.

A flagship bottle

At the same time as the renaming of the company, Summit Brands was test-marketing a new White Brite laundry whitener product. Summit Brands felt it was the perfect time to develop the "ultimate bottle," as they called it internally, that would achieve several key goals with White Brite, Super Iron Out, and other products in their portfolio. Aside from connecting, or unifying, similar Summit Brand products, they also sought to consolidate package inventories and operational efficiencies.

Kornick Lindsay led the process with a significant structural makeover. The bottle shape was softened to appeal to both male and female consumers and to provide a point of differentiation from competitors in stock containers. Functionality was enhanced with a built-in handle in the large 5-lb. bottle and a designated grip area in the 30-oz. bottle.

As the bottle shapes went through significant change, the graphic branding needed to ensure the appeal of its current customers continued through. Kornick Lindsay preserved the existing color palette of Super Iron Out, which continues to enjoy powerful, positive equity.

Kornick Lindsay cleaned up the Super Iron Out logo and the communication of benefits while a bigger and bolder swoosh graphic was evolved for modern and dynamic attitude conveying a solid, trustworthy, quality, and affordable brand. Kornick Lindsay also updated the White Brite graphics in similar fashion.

Joe Kornick, a principal at Kornick Lindsay, believed it was critical to create packaging that would be appropriate for the category while communicating quality and performance to consumers. Tony Cronk, director of marketing believes they succeeded, saying, "The design really communicates the quality of the product inside."

Kornick believes his firm's "holistic" package design approach helped Super Iron Out and White Brite stake out a new position at retail, a position Summit Brands can leverage further in their portfolio. Kornick believes both structural and graphic design can combine in a single integrated process to yield an innovative solution. "It's really the tip of the innovation iceberg here," says Kornick.