AbilityOne & Skilcraft: Rebranding Design Support
Summary & Brief:
Client:
Washington, DC
Our Scope:
Graphic design services, logo design, package design, strategic planning, and printing services.
Objective:
To assist both Skilcraft and one of their agencies, LCI, in a rebranding process. This process was kicked off as a result of AbilityOne updating their brand Skilcraft to a more modern look and feel, with new guidelines, and branding.
Our goal was to assist in first building strategic guidance for AbilityOne in how to rollout rebranding direction to other agencies throughout the AbilityOne program. This guidance was needed in order to give proper instruction to other agencies on how to properly rebrand all item packaging, shipping packaging, and any other branding materials that carried the Skilcraft logo.
Work with LCI in revamping their 70,000 SKU count product line in reapplying the new branding designs on their shipping containers, and product packaging. In turn, helping the AbilityOne commission revamp their brand with their largest agency.
Solution:
Over a 4 year period we successfully redesigned, rebranded, and oversaw distribution of the item packages and shipping boxes. Every item in the 70,000 SKU catalog that had applicable packaging to update, was redesigned and released back into the market.
We produced a strategy for the AbilityOne commission, in leading the rebranding process at LCI, which we helped them to develop for the other agencies. We worked with LCI's manufacturing and purchasing departments in building a notification system when stock was running low on the product, and shipping box SKUs. Once this reached a lower point based on demand, we would then start to produce orders for the new packaging, and start work on the new designs, which would then be submitted to the agency for the first review, once approved, would then go to the AbilityOne commission for a final signoff. Producing designs item by item before stock reached a low level, proved hard for the agencies as many if not all, with such large inventories and product catalogs, were not able to map what product specifically needed updating until they reached a low quantity point. This new system, which was socialized industry wide, produced effective results of the other agencies and is continually used today.
Full Overview:
Creative Leadership, and Design Guidance
We worked collaboratively with marketing leaders at AbilityOne and Skilcraft to provide feedback on the new branding guidelines, rollout, and brand book before release. This leadership and direction, proved to be most influential in their decision making process. These new brand guidelines we helped to develop, were distributed to the dozens of agencies that work with the National Industries for the Blind, or NIB.
Graphic Design Services
The bulk of this work was graphic design services. We created hundreds of new packaging designs, box designs, and branding to LCI's 70,000 SKU catalog. We went about doing this by building new creative comps in Adobe Illustrator, then sending these comps to the AbilityOne commission for review and final sign off.
Rebranding Leadership and Support
We worked extensivley with the AbilityOne commission to develop not only operational processes detailed above, but creative review process, which involved agency marketers, or operational leads, submitting a fillable form directly the the AbilityOne team with specific fields for what was being designed, what copy had to be in place, and how many variants of the item were available, along with old creative, if any existed. This process was in place for agencies that did not have adequate design resources to develop creative material. The AbilityOne commission would then leverage their own designer, to create the new material and send it back to the agency.