CASE 6: POLARMAX
POLARMAX, one of the primary brands of Longworth Industries, was looking to revise its packaging. I sat down with Trey (former Marketing Manager) and began a series of questions that was a review of what the company had done in the past, what was in the marketplace, what the key selling points were per product, etc. Several hours later - we had a rough sketch of key things needed to make this package work. POLARMAX was divided into systems - a set of 4. The 4 systems varied by weight and by features. There had been some color used in the prior packaging, but I felt we should push the color to make a distinct difference when several feet away from the racks.
I wanted a technical look to the garment - and I felt dots in complex patterns would allude to that - but I wanted something a bit more intriguing than dots in a line. Longworth had sold another of their products in a mesh bag. I was holding the bag in my hand while thinking about the dots, and noticed that the room light was creating a wavy dot pattern by shining through the bag. That idea led me to create the motion dots seen in the packaging. To clarify things, I feel if there are other options, then to make it easy to understand where a certain product fits into the scheme of things we need to tell more of the story. In this case, I created 2 key things: 1) the system "menu" on the top left corner - listing all 4 system numbers. 2) The system chart on the back of the package that shows each of the products and their inherent features. This allows us to cross sale - by showing other product options and features.
Trey wanted to figure out a way to have the fewest numbers of SKU's of packaging - but at the same time be able to put a picture on the package. We were able to narrow the SKU by creating just 3 U-boards and a 4th hanging tag for the core system. The seperator was the set of stickers I created for every item printed on clear plastic at Burlington Packaging (they did a great a job!) I made indicators on the package that helped assembly see how to place the stickers on the package. I also created a set of size/gender stickers (see above the large "S" on brown. The brown signifies men visually - and the word "men" appears on the black stripe.) In the end, it was a great looking package. Longworth's POLARMAX was and still is the only base layer to show a picture of the item within the package - not just rely on the UPC sticker and a text sticker to define contents.
We ended up with a product sticker (labeled and printed on clear plastic) and a size/gender sticker (men / women / youth) on the front, and a UPC sticker for pricing on the back.