LCI & Walmart: Saving Blind Employment
Summary & Brief:
Client:
Durham, NC
Our Scope:
Content creation, graphic design, brand strategy, and positioning.
Objective:
To revitalize an ageing sponge mop brand and secure planogram space, and Walmart's approval on keeping the brand on the shelves through updating the product, branding, and packaging to a more modern look and feel.
Provide new graphic design to the product packaging, branding strategy, research on modern sponge mop solutions, and develop a catchy/visually appealing presentation to distribute to the Walmart team in order to win approval.
Secure the sponge mop contract through assuring Walmart's modernization requirements are met.
Solution:
Designed a fully modernized packaging for the mop and individual sponge that incorporates graphical elements showcasing blind labor, made in America, and product features. The new design stands out on the shelf from competitors, and easily communicates the benefits of purchase.
Constructed a captivating presentation that incorporated the new branding and path forward while highlighting the strategic pivots undertaken to assure the mop line would be fully modernized in the market, for the sales team to present into the Walmart review board.
Provided guidance on future outlook to the leadership team at LCI and suggestions on modernizing the overall mop design which were adopted for the purposes of this presentation.
The above resulted in LCI securing the contract from Walmart and prevented the loss of planogram space which would have removed the mop line from all store locations. This resulted in $2,000,000 in annual sales secured, saving of 4 blind and visually impaired jobs.
Full Overview:
Walmart was threatening to remove LCI's mops from the shelves for a few main reasons:
- Packaging was stale, old, outdated, and displeasing.
- Product design was outdated
- Consumers could not see any benefits in the store
After understanding the pain points that LCI was suffering from we concluded the following: Their mop branding, and design, had been the same for nearly 20 years. There was no clear distinguishing selling points, elements that would help the mop standout on the shelf, nor was it easy to depict from a distance, or up close for that matter, two of the strongest selling points: made in the USA, and the fact that the mop was actually built with blind labor.
From this, our first step was to establish clear positioning for those more unique selling points: Made in the USA and with blind labor. We then wanted to assure there was enough space to showcase other product specific facts that would help benefit the consumer in making their purchase decision.
Eye Catching Communicative Creative
We immediately wanted to attract the eye of the consumer. After researching competitors, none were leveraging the color scheme we choose: royal purple. This would allow the mop to immediately standout on the shelf. Further, other brands were making their packaging too busy which clogged up the sellable space with dozens of tiny selling points, creative, with multiple blends of color. Assuring we had a simple, streamlined, and to the point package would help in drawing the eye of a passing customer.
We then built on this, highlighting clearly more unique attributes of blind employment and USA made which stand out clearly and proudly on the mop head package. The center USA graphic is over a clear space where the sponge shows through, allowing for even more visibility.
Adding space for clear depictions of product functionality: sponge type, and squeeze action was integral for consumers to understand what other benefits they would be getting other than the benefits they would be giving back to the community (blind labor support and USA job support) to help further push them across the finish line.
Robust and Visually Appealing Presentation:
Another major element to this effort was assuring the LCI team had catchy presentation in to showcase the the Walmart review board. We developed graphics, slide templates, content, and branding strategies to assist them in their contract award.
Our graphic approach to this presentation was to plug the visual elements into the same theme as that of the modernized packaging we had built. We also included images of the blind employees that were employed from the mop manufacturing to help with the decision making process. We added multiple variants of the product packaging should Walmart want to go with different options other than the flagship, being the purple design.
In addition, we also offered the LCI team market research, guidance, and suggestions on an updated mop design to go along with the updated packaging we had created. We had done this through leveraging consumer research, working with their product development team, product designers, and leadership team on presenting various options to leverage for future manufacturing efforts.