When It Rains, It Pours

Staying Dry with Umbrella Branding

By Joe DiPalma

It's one thing to develop branding for one product. It's quite another to develop an umbrella brand design for 40 feet of store space. When it 's complicated by a line that features both licensed and unlicensed products—and when each product in the line must tell its own individual story while at the same time allowing the consumer to recognize the brand —it takes more than just a team of designers. It takes a team of major league problem-solvers.

Packaging a story

At Atomica Design Group, we like to think of ourselves as just that: a crack team of problem-solvers, but when a customer approached us with the scenario I 've just described, it left us scratching our heads for a little while. We've faced some pretty tall orders in our nine years in the industry, but this multi-faceted problem was the tallest order yet, and it left us with the following long list of questions.

• How do we tell the client's story with the packaging?
• How do we create a cohesive line of many products, packaging sizes and styles and ensure that it looks like it all comes from the same company?
• How do we make sure that the consumer—who has a long, trusting relationship to the established brand—does not lose faith in the brand in its new, redesigned guise? After all, brand integrity isn't something any client wants to lose. How could we keep it intact?
• How could we design a program that held together, while at the same time allow each product to stand out from the competition and catch the consumer's eye? And how could we give every SKU a clear, concise message under the umbrella?
• The client had presented us with a variety of different boxes, blister packs and packaging structures. Would our design team be able to find an element to link them all?
• As if all this wasn't complicated enough, the umbrella branding had to work across properties from major licensors including Disney, Marvel, and Nickelodeon, each with its own distinctive style and consumer expectations. And of course, each licensor had its own style guide requirements that needed to be met. What could we do to factor this into the equation?

Sketching out ideas

With a limited time frame in which to design the entire line, we set to work. Our designers sketched out hundreds of thumbnail treatments. We bounced these around for a while, finally ending up with a system based on an "S curve." It was simple, but it was bold and flexible enough so that it could be modified for a variety of different formats and packages.

We built a uniform space into the architecture of the design where different licensed characters could live and an area where the properties' logos could be prominently placed. We also created a solid system for each product's name and its individual call-outs across product lines. The client wanted its own name placed more subtly, so we found a way to work it into the design in a way that would assure trusting customers that they were in familiar hands.

The best part is that the designs flew through the approval process. After all that hard work, we breathed a collective sigh of relief. But we hadn't seen the last of umbrella branding. A few weeks later, another client who wanted to target a big pet supply chain with licensed products approached us. They needed us to come up with the packaging structure and the umbrella brand graphics, too.

Ideas from the deep

Our product development team researched the market while our account executive did competitive analysis. We sat down and sketched out several aquariums with SpongeBob SquarePants, Finding Nemo, and Pirates of the Caribbean properties. We even came up with a few concepts for a Habitrail using the Winnie the Pooh license.

We created presentation boards and got them over to the client for their feedback. From those concepts we worked up several fully rendered illustrations of the products and packaging. In a matter of days these boards were in front of buyers and some very substantial orders were written.

Our illustrations were sent over to the factory and costing came through very quickly. Since the client already had the buyer's approval on the product and package concepts, our designers immediately set out creating the die lines and the package mechanicals. Our sculptors fabricated the prototypes and mockups in-house.

The prepress department ripped the files and we got match proofs over to the client and the licensor for approval. The match proofs were sent to the vendors in China and the counter sample was a perfect match to the style guide requirements.

As you can probably tell, we're proud of our ability to fulfill all of our clients' needs in one shop. We've made service a top priority, so our account executives and design teams are with our clients from start to finish. This allows them to develop an intimate understanding of the clients' needs, timelines, and tastes. All of which allows us to be creative and efficient at the same time—a necessity when umbrella branding is part of the equation. Being efficient keeps our billable hours down, and everyone is happy when the products sell. Problem solved, at least until the next time it rains...

Joe DiPalma is president of Atomica Design Group in Morrisville, PA, and can be reached at 215-337-9663 or by visiting www.atomicadesign.com.