Agency intros design practice to benefit across-the-store private brands
Brand design agency CBX has introduced a new packaging design methodology and team that tackles across-the-category packaging design, ideal for lifestyle private brands and flagship store brands that touch on many parts of the store.
For example, CBX worked with Sam’s Club and its Member’s Mark brand for a high-volume design offering, touching on several products across the center store for the club chain. CBX, based in New York and Minneapolis, calls the new high-volume design practice Forge, and the launch of the service is in response to many of its branded and private brand clients possessing complex portfolios with multiple product tiers, segments and pack types, according to CBX.
Forge was born out of CBX’s experience with a brand-led, agile approach to adaptive design for more than 50,000 SKUS for retailers and CPG companies such as Sam’s Club, Rite Aid, Duane Reade and Clorox, and includes:
- Thousands of SKUs for Giant Eagle brand spanning all store categories
- Developing and executing thousands of SKUS for Walgreen’s stores across five brands throughout the center store
- More than 2,000 SKUS for Duane Reade stores, encompassing multiple categories across five brands and three tiers
- 137 SKUS for Clorox across three tiers and eight countries globally.
“What sets Forge’s multi-SKU, volume design process apart for CPG companies and retailers is that we built on the belief that scaling a brand’s package design is not a production process," notes Todd Maute, partner at CBX. "Rather, Forge embraces a creative process that provides clients with talented designers and project managers trained in agile best practices who ensure across-the-category brand consistency of execution. We believe that ensuring design integrity and creating systems that can flex across structures, tiers, and categories is critical for our client’s success.”
Maute is a frequent blog contributor to Store Brands, recently writing about the need for store brand portfolios needing to be more agile, avoiding SKU bloat and better managing large volume private brands.
Lauren Kossar, associate creative director at CBX, also received recognition as a Game Changer for her work on the Wawa brand.
“Virtually all package design agencies can offer services across a few dozen product SKUs,” said Maute. “But with traditional production-driven processes which focus on file production, it’s easy for brand strategy and design intent to get lost in translation for programs that live in hundreds of SKUs. That’s where Forge’s expertise comes in."