Category: Retail Environment

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Pioneering the New Tea Culture in America featuring Sashee Chandran, Tea Drops

May 13, 2021  |  an article by Diana Fryc

Gooder Podcast featuring Sashee Chandran

“Luck is hard work and opportunity meeting.” – Sashee Chandran 

This week on the Gooder Podcast, I had the pleasure of talking with Sashee Chandran, the founder, and CEO of Tea Drops. We discuss the historical colonial influence in American tea culture and how her diverse background has encouraged her to create something new: Tea Drops. We also learn about the tea category shaking innovation of Tea Drops’ products and some of the trends her brand is leveraging. Along the way, we get to hear the inspirational story of a diligent and humble entrepreneur who transforms the traditional way of enjoying tea. 

In this episode we learn: 

  • About the history and inspiration of Tea Drops. 
  • The surprising A-ha moment of her product idea. 
  • About her go-to-market alternate channel strategy, and why it worked.
  • Where Sashee’s passion and drive for risk-taking come from.
  • What Tea Drop’s give-back program has been doing to tackle the global water crisis.
  • Diana and Sashee’s personal stories about their love for tea and how tea has helped them connect to their loved ones. 
Gooder Podcast

Pioneering the New Tea Culture in America featuring Sashee Chandran, Tea Drops

About Sashee Chandran: 

Sashee Chandran is the founder and CEO of Tea Drops, which creates bagless whole leaf teas using a patented process — shedding about 15% less waste than traditional teabag packaging. Tea Drops has become a favorite among new and experienced tea drinkers alike, launching innovative tea experiences that merge flavorful blends, food art, and edgy design. Tea Drops an omnichannel brand, selling D2C and also available in 1,500 retailers — loved by Oprah Magazine, Chrissy Teigen, and former first lady Michelle Obama. Sashee is a 1st Place $20K Women Founders Network pitch winner, 1st Place $100K Tory Burch Fellow Grant winner, and the 1st place $50K PepsiCo WomanMade Challenge winner. She has also raised over $3.5M in VC funding for Tea Drops. 

Guests Social Media Links: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasheechandran/ 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sasheechandran/?hl=en 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sasheec 

Email: sashee@myteadrop.com 

Website: https://www.myteadrop.com/ 

Show Resources: 

Loose leaf tea is tea that does not come pre-packaged in tea bags. Because the leaves are not crammed into a tea bag, the tea maintains a higher quality and aroma while offering the best possible health benefits. 

eBay Inc. is an American multinational e-commerce corporation based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995, and became a notable success story of the dot-com bubble.  

Bubble tea is a tea-based drink that originated in Taiwan in the early 1980s. It most commonly consists of tea accompanied by chewy tapioca balls, but it can be made with other toppings as well. 

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that issues patents to inventors and businesses for their inventions, and trademark registration for product and intellectual property identification. 

Tory Burch Foundation competition Designed to provide women entrepreneurs with the tools and platform necessary to grow their business. 

8Greens is an effervescent dietary supplement tablet, packed with enough superfoods to give your healthy diet a green boost.  

United Natural Foods, Inc. is a Providence, R.I.-based natural and organic food company. It is the largest publicly traded wholesale distributor of health and specialty food in the United States and Canada. UNFI is Whole Foods Market’s main supplier, with their traffic making up over a third of its revenue in 2018. 

Nordstrom, Inc. is an American luxury department store chain. Founded in 1901 by John W. Nordstrom and Carl F. Wallin, it originated as a shoe store and evolved into a full-line retailer with departments for clothing, footwear, handbags, jewelry, accessories, cosmetics, and fragrances.  

Neiman Marcus Group, Inc., originally Neiman-Marcus, is an American chain of luxury department stores owned by the Neiman Marcus Group, headquartered in Dallas, Texas. 

The Thirst Project is a non-profit organization whose aim is to bring safe drinking water to communities around the world where it is not immediately available. The Thirst Project collects money and builds wells all across the continent of Africa where villages do not have immediate drinking water.

Diana Fryc

For Diana, a fierce determination to pursue what’s right is rooted in her DNA. The daughter of parents who endured unimaginable hardship before emigrating from Eastern Europe to the U.S., she is built for a higher purpose. Starting with an experience working with Jane Goodall to source sustainably made paper, she went on to a career helping Corporate America normalize the use of environmentally responsible products and materials before coming to Retail Voodoo.

Connect with Diana

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Massive Innovation is Coming to Food and Beverage. Is Your Brand Ready?

March 31, 2021  |  an article by David Lemley

2021 will launch more innovation at one time than we’ve seen in a while. Here’s how to prepare your brand for the competition.

By switching to a brand-driven innovation strategy, better-for-you brand owners are future-proofing their business and retooling for growth.

Download this white paper to learn how to:

  • Understand where you are in the Brand Life Cycle.
  • Capitalize on the innovation boom in food and beverage.
  • Prioritize consumer-facing communication to increase brand relevance for your best-performing products.
  • Identify two types of innovation and decide what makes sense for your brand.

Get this exclusive report brought to you by Retail Voodoo, the branding firm who has helped Essentia, KIND, Russell Stover, Sahale Snacks, HighKey, and Starbucks build brand-driven strategies that create meaningful, sustained growth.

David Lemley

David was two decades into a design career with a wall full of shiny awards and a portfolio of clients including Nordstrom, Starbucks, Nintendo, and REI. His rocket trajectory veered when his oldest child faced a health challenge of indeterminate origin. Hundreds of research hours later, David identified food allergy as the issue and convinced skeptical medical professionals caring for his child. Since that experience, David and Retail Voodoo have been on a mission to create a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable food system for all.

Connect with David
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When Blue Ocean, the Joy of Food and Food Waste Collide featuring Perteet Spencer, AYO Foods

March 8, 2021  |  an article by Diana Fryc

Gooder Podcast Featuring Perteet Spencer

This week on the Gooder Podcast I had the pleasure of talking with Perteet Spencer, the co-founder of AYO Foods. Using her spidy SPINS senses and her desire to create a brand that celebrates the ingredients, flavors, and culture of the West African diaspora, Perteet takes us on her journey of transition and joy. Along the way we learn how her Liberian upbringing and heritage inspires her new venture and how this cultural view naturally embraces a more inclusive food production system.

In this episode we learn:

  • A little background about her brand AYO Foods.
  • Why Perteet thinks North American consumers are ready for African flavors, textures, and ingredients.
  • What food trends shape AYO Foods innovation.
  • Why she thinks Chicago has become THE place to watch for food innovation.
  • How to use data as an indicator, and not simply validation, to uncover new innovation platforms and opportunities.
  • Pereet’s thoughts on how to shrink pre-production food waste through product and manufacturing innovation.
Gooder Podcast

When Blue Ocean, the Joy of Food and Food Waste Collide featuring Perteet Spencer, AYO Foods

About Pereet Spencer:

Perteet is thrilled to be able to bring all of her passions into her role as co-founder of AYO Foods. Seeking to build a more inclusive food system that reflected her experience growing up in a Liberian family, Perteet launched AYO with her husband Fred last summer with the vision of creating a platform brand that celebrated the ingredients, flavors, and culture of the West African diaspora.  

Prior launching AYO, Perteet held brand, sales, and consulting leadership roles at LEGO, General Mills, and SPINS.   

When she’s not actively working on AYO, you can usually find Perteet spending time in the kitchen with her two girls or advancing the issues of food equity through her involvement in the Food Recovery Network, a non-profit focused on eliminating food insecurity through food waste recovery.

Guests Social Media Links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/perteet-spencer-18b3146/ 

Email: perteet@ayo-foods.com

Website: https://ayo-foods.com/  

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pmcspence/?hl=en 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/perteets?lang=en 

Show Resources:

Moonboi Project – In Kpelle, “Moonboi” means prosperity. At AYO Foods, we believe that we have a personal responsibility to enrich the communities that inspired our products. 

General Mills, Inc. – is an American multinational manufacturer and marketer of branded consumer foods sold through retail stores. It is headquartered in Golden Valley, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis.

SPINS – transforms trillions of retailer data into performance solutions to accelerate growth, and deepen loyalty with shoppers.

Food Recovery Network – a nonprofit focused on eliminating food insecurity through food waste recovery.

Whole Foods Market, Inc. – is an American multinational supermarket chain headquartered in Austin, Texas, which sells products free from hydrogenated fats and artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives. A USDA Certified Organic grocer in the United States, the chain is popularly known for its organic selections.

Girl Power Africa – an organization that was founded a few years back, really in service of women who were victims of civil war and are trying to get back on their feet in Liberia. 

Imperfect Foods – Shop affordable groceries and exclusive items that went from unwanted to wish for. Reducing food and retail product waste, one household at a time.

PepsiCo – is an American multinational food, snack, and beverage corporation headquartered in Harrison, New York, in the hamlet of Purchase. PepsiCo has interests in the manufacturing, marketing, and distribution of grain-based snack foods, beverages, and other products.

Betty Crocker – is a brand and fictional character used in advertising campaigns for food and recipes. The character was originally created by the Washburn-Crosby Company in 1921 following a contest in the Saturday Evening Post.

Lego – is a Danish toy production company based in Billund. It is best known for the manufacture of Lego-brand toys, consisting mostly of interlocking plastic bricks. The Lego Group has also built several amusement parks around the world, each known as Legoland, and operates numerous retail stores.

Diana Fryc

For Diana, a fierce determination to pursue what’s right is rooted in her DNA. The daughter of parents who endured unimaginable hardship before emigrating from Eastern Europe to the U.S., she is built for a higher purpose. Starting with an experience working with Jane Goodall to source sustainably made paper, she went on to a career helping Corporate America normalize the use of environmentally responsible products and materials before coming to Retail Voodoo.

Connect with Diana

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When and Where are the Most Powerful Times to Use Consumer Insights

December 1, 2020  |  an article by David Lemley

Our experience with clients has shown us that when it comes to consumer data, there are two camps. Some organizations can’t make the simplest decision without tons of research to back it up; some disregard research entirely and go with gut instinct.

Of course, the reality is that Beloved & Dominant naturals brands make the best decisions with the right combination of data and “feels.” Research without analysis is just a bunch of statistics. And decisions without data are just guesses.

To use research properly—whether it’s a Usage & Attitude study, trend research, syndicated retail sales data (SPINS), or focus groups—you need to overlay the findings with your brand’s mission and vision. Analyze the data through your brand lens—that’s where you’ll find actionable, “decisionable” insight to guide everything from channel expansion to product development to messaging.

When to Lean into Consumer Data

One of the greatest decision-making vulnerabilities in our naturals category is our collective tendency to assume that our consumers are just like us. Especially in brands led by a creative founder who innovated a special product and grew a business around it, leadership believes that the brand’s tribe consists of like-minded and like-lived fans. Practically speaking, consumer insight can be a daily reality check against our biases.

Brands often don’t seek insight without a pain point. When one of these challenges starts to emerge or there’s a pattern, you should seek it out:

  • You’re not getting the velocity you predicted, want, or used to have.
  • You’re losing ground to competitors that are more trend aware and innovative.
  • Retail partners are less enthusiastic about your offering and are shelving your products less prominently.
  • Store brands are eroding your traction.
  • You’re seeking to widen your audience beyond the consumers you currently serve.

Major disruptions like the current pandemic are also ideal times to procure consumer insight. For example, The Hartman Group is publishing research on how Covid-19 is affecting grocery shopping habits.

What Data Can Tell You—and Can’t

Generally, we don’t conduct focus groups with our clients. There’s a time and place for them, but they’re not relevant for developing the big brand strategy that we work on. Focus groups and other primary consumer research yield a small sample size of opinions that can help you make tactical moves like line extension or packaging design messaging hierarchy:

  • the general look and feel (e.g., I like that photo, logotype, colorway)
  • I would tell my friends about this product
  • I may prefer vanilla vs. chocolate
  • the benefits claims would influence my decision to buy the product

Consumer feedback and syndicated data can’t offer wisdom about how people connect with your brand on a deeper level:

  • how your brand fits into their lives in a cultural context
  • how they behave when your product is one of many in a consideration set
  • where they would expect to see your brand
  • what is the best sequence for your innovation pipeline and channel strategy

When you’re developing a brand strategy, it’s essential to bring intuition and expertise to shopper research; often, that takes outside consultation. You can ask consumers all the questions you want, but they can’t do the critical thinking for you.

How to Manage Data

If you’re a data-driven organization, your opportunity is not to gather more, but to organize and rationalize what you have so it’s useful. Often, brand teams have so much information that they’re paralyzed. To better manage existing consumer research:

Get it organized. Take inventory of the consumer data you have, and in what format it exists. Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business and see if your IT team can build a dashboard that aggregates multiple reports.

Keep it current. As we like to say, data is like in-laws and fish—really good fresh, not so much after a week. Consumer research generally has a 12-month shelf life before it becomes outdated. If you’re relying on three-year-old data to make decisions, you’re immediately behind the curve.

Spread it around. Your sales team has data, your marketing team has data, your retail partners have data. Share it across the organization and take key decisions out of business silos.

Consumer Data Plus Brand Insight

Beloved & Dominant naturals brands combine information with insight to make the right decisions. It takes overlaying the brand mission and vision to create analysis in order to inform those “gut” decisions. Without the strategy, the understanding of the consumers, the point of view—you can’t prioritize options and make decisions.

Research alone is just a set of numbers; its power emerges when you gain clusters of nuance within the data that takes a strategist and marketing team to translate and respond to. Ignoring data would be foolish—but to know what to do with it, that’s the magic.

Think of those “hidden picture” games you had as a kid, where you’d have to lay a sheet of red acetate over the page to see the full image. Analysis—ideally from an outside advisor with tons of expertise and zero bias—is the red acetate that reveals your brand’s path. If you are ready for that external eye – or maybe just thinking about it – drop us a line and let’s talk.

David Lemley

David was two decades into a design career with a wall full of shiny awards and a portfolio of clients including Nordstrom, Starbucks, Nintendo, and REI. His rocket trajectory veered when his oldest child faced a health challenge of indeterminate origin. Hundreds of research hours later, David identified food allergy as the issue and convinced skeptical medical professionals caring for his child. Since that experience, David and Retail Voodoo have been on a mission to create a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable food system for all.

Connect with David

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Multichannel Packaging Strategies for Naturals Food and Beverage Brands

June 25, 2020  |  an article by David Lemley

Since March, stay-at-home orders nationwide have radically transformed the way consumers shop for food, beverage, and personal care products. People who’d never before ordered groceries online set up accounts with local retailers or service providers like Instacart and Postmates. Folks accustomed to ordering shoes and home goods from Amazon started ordering bananas and energy bars. And even people who continued brick-and-mortar shopping did it “Supermarket Sweep”-style, racing through aisles and grabbing whatever they could find.

And for many households, online food and beverage purchases will continue after the shutdown eases.

Even if you don’t have a direct-to-consumer sales operation or big Amazon presence, shoppers are finding, choosing, and ordering your products online via Kroger or Instacart.

How does your packaging play in the online space?

Packaging: Your First Chance to Win a Customer

In Beloved & Dominant Brands, we write that the retail experience (in-store and online) plays an outsized role in the Brand Ecosystem — the seven-platform communication pyramid that drives marketing strategy for natural food, beverage, and wellness brands.

That’s because retail may be the first time a consumer encounters your brand. She may see you on the shelf or on a search results page and be intrigued enough to pull out her phone or open another browser tab to look your brand up online.

Consumers interact with your packaging more frequently than other touchpoints in your messaging, so it needs to do the heavy lifting from a marketing perspective. Your packaging has to a) to get your product into the shopper’s actual or virtual cart and b) to communicate with her when she gets the product home.

Multichannel Packaging for Food, Beverage, & Wellness Brands

Consider the different ways packaging functions in three retail channels: DTC, online, and in-store.

DTC — via your own website and direct marketing efforts — is the channel where you have the most control. You determine how the product is merchandised, how the messaging reads, how consumers get to and from the product pages to other contextual information on your website. Your DTC packaging has to look great, of course, but its real power comes after the sale. When that shipping box arrives in the consumer’s home, the product packaging should offer a high-touch experience that delights her, confirms her choice, and convinces her to buy again.

Online is the Wild West of retailing. The consumer enters a search term on Amazon, say ‘gluten-free energy bar’ and your product shows up along with hundreds of others. It’s a frustrating shopping experience with overwhelming choice. As we write in Beloved & Dominant Brands, your packaging has to be the right kind of visible — identifiable as part of the category yet different enough to catch the shopper’s eye, particularly if she isn’t familiar with your brand.

Our basic guideline for a brand’s in-store presentation is the 30–10–3 Rule. From 30 feet away, your packaging should help identify the category. From 10 feet away, your consumers should be able to read your brand’s trade dress or core identity in order to navigate to it. And from 3 feet away, your brand story, features, benefits, and purpose should be so clear and compelling that consumers pick up your package.

More than ever, your packaging system has to excel in all three channels. It’s a big ask.

Packaging as a Communication Tool

Beyond the product attributes, beloved and dominant brands use packaging as a communication tool to talk about what they stand for. Regardless of how they shop, assume that consumers know what’s in the package. So talk about who you are beyond the product. (As parents of a Girl Scout, we can point to the Girl Scouts brand as a great example of how to use a box to communicate a greater mission and purpose.) Include enough origin story on your pack so that it reassures them and prompts them to purchase again.

Remember that when consumers order online and the delivery arrives at home, unpacking the Instacart delivery becomes an unboxing event. The shopper spends a moment with your package — what are you telling him? How do you make him feel?

Case Study: HighKey

We’ve helped several natural food and beverage clients wrestle this dragon, and it’s been humbling to learn what works across all three sales channels.

HighKey is a brand of keto-friendly snacks that’s become a darling in the market. It began as a DTC brand, but leaders aspired to conventional retail channels. When we started working with them, they thought their audience was fitness-minded men who were managing carb intake in order to get ripped. We helped them conduct research that proved that the “keto bro” doesn’t care about what he eats; instead the brand’s ideal audience were female consumers more interested in dieting for weight loss, not hard-core fitness fanatics. This consumer wanted a snack that she could eat on the go; she didn’t want something that looked or tasted like “diet food.”

We brought in chefs and food scientists to remake and expand the product line with clean ingredients that still taste great. And we helped them build a non-pretentious, everyday brand that caters to ordinary women seeking to lose weight without sacrificing flavor or indulgence as she satisfies a craving.

On the packaging front, we designed a system that doesn’t look like diet food. It looks like delicious, appealing snacks for people whose life is in motion, who love junk food but are concerned about calories and carbs and sugar. The packaging is perfectly imperfect, the product shown in motion, and the color palette is bold and energetic. It looks just as great on shelf as it does on Instagram.

As a result, HighKey has continued to grow its DTC channel, landed at No. 1 in their category on Amazon, and are expanding into Target and Whole Foods online and brick-and-mortar stores. In just six months, HighKey went from DTC to major chain and sales have exploded, because they got packaging right in all three channels.

You have opportunity now to capture those new-to-online food and beverage shoppers. We can help you evaluate whether your packaging is doing all it can across every sales channel.

David Lemley

David was two decades into a design career with a wall full of shiny awards and a portfolio of clients including Nordstrom, Starbucks, Nintendo, and REI. His rocket trajectory veered when his oldest child faced a health challenge of indeterminate origin. Hundreds of research hours later, David identified food allergy as the issue and convinced skeptical medical professionals caring for his child. Since that experience, David and Retail Voodoo have been on a mission to create a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable food system for all.

Connect with David

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Positioning Your DTC Brand for Traditional Retail

January 7, 2020  |  an article by David Lemley

Decades ago, technology rewrote the old business adage, “he who has the most gold wins,” to “he who owns the factory wins.” But huge capital and production capacity are no longer real barriers to entry. The new truth is this: She who has the idea — the brand — wins.

And nowhere is that concept playing out more disruptively than in the direct-to-consumer market (DTC). Brands can bypass traditional selling gatekeepers (wholesalers and retailers) and transact directly with consumers. The better-for-you space — food, beverage, nutrition, beauty, pet — is ripe for this disruption; in fact, we have three projects in the studio right now for DTC BFY clients. (How’s that for alphabet soup?)

An article in AdAge calls these brands “venture-funded, young, agile startups,” and they draw upon the marketing, innovation, and rapid-launch strategies common in tech. It’s tough to get a handle on how many DTC brands are out there, but their impact is significant: DTC advertising increased by 50% over the past year, according to a November 2019 Forbes article. All of these brands are young, less than a decade old; the buzziest ones include:

  • SmileDirectClub
  • UNTUCKit
  • Casper
  • BarkBox
  • ThirdLove
  • StitchFix
  • Glossier
  • Freshly
  • and, yes, Peloton

Why DTC Brands Are Rising

DTC is booming for two primary reasons. First, people are more willing to buy stuff online. We’re comfortable with the idea of purchasing an item that we haven’t seen, felt, tasted, or tried on. And we’re OK with spending a couple thousand dollars on a mattress; we’ve overcome any risk aversion to online shopping. Ecommerce suits busy modern life and appeal to time-starved people who have reasonable discretionary income.

Second, selling direct is so much more comfortable for marketers and investors because there’s a formula: Spend X doing Y generates Z results. There’s a bright line connecting online ad spending to sales conversion and revenue because it’s totally traceable. The path to entry is relatively smooth: Online sellers don’t have to commit to carrying huge inventory, pay slotting fees, convince retail buyers, and for a retail category review in order to start getting product in-store. You just need a commerce-enabled website of your own or an Amazon landing page.

Differences in Retail Channels

Consumer expectations and selling strategies vary by channel. So let’s look at some of those differences:

In the true DTC channel — i.e., your own website — you as the brand marketer fully control the customer experience. This is where your consumer education effort, which is the foundational platform of the Brand Ecosystem, is grounded. All your social media and digital marketing points to your website. Here’s where you talk about your brand’s WHY, the problems you solve in the consumer’s world and, finally, the features and benefits of your products. If she opts to buy from you here, you have ultimate control over how she progresses to the sale and how you communicate with her afterward.

In the e-commerce world — i.e., Amazon or Walmart.com — your brand is competing in the slogfest, one of hundreds or thousands of products a customer’s search might turn up. She’ll be more likely to choose you if she knows your brand and its reputation. Let’s face it: shopping on Amazon or a big-box retailer’s site is kind of a dismal experience — impersonal and overwhelming. But the consumer is essentially trading convenience and price for a lesser experience. The benefit of e-commerce is that your brand gets wider exposure to consumers who don’t already know you.

The physical retail environment retains the capability to surprise and delight the shopper. She’ll have higher expectations in-store, and brands have the opportunity to make a much bigger impact. Yes, she may still buy online, but that choice will be driven by how she interacts with your brand in the real world.

From Online to Brick & Mortar Retailing

We recently worked with a brand that sold exclusively DTC for six months before launching into a physical retail initiative. For this brand, like many others, DTC was the runway to brick and mortar retailing.  According to a MediaRadar report: “Of the top 20 DTC companies, 30% had their own stores, 25% sold products in other retailers, and another 15% used both their own stores and other retailers. Interestingly, many DTC firms have partnered with only one retailer on an exclusive basis.”

For example, Casper mattresses are available at select Target stores, and the brand has its own freestanding stores in the NYC metro area. Thinx, the women’s underwear brand, is available from Nordstrom. Harry’s razors and Quip toothbrushes sell at Target.

It makes sense that DTC brands are eyeing retail, because DTC — while it’s growing by double digits and represents billions of dollars in sales — still accounts for just a fraction of the overall market. A DTC brand may be killing it, but direct selling in most categories represents perhaps 6% to 14% of total market. So if this is you, you might be leaving tons of money on the table.

A few notes on making a successful transition from online selling to physical retail:

1) There has to be a reason for people to believe in your brand beyond your products’ features and benefits. Your brand is bigger than that: It’s the promises you make to your world and the ways in which you keep them. You’ll never compete in the retail environment — where you have little control — without a real WHY.

2) Your why has to appeal to the retailer, not just the consumer; in order to secure shelf space, you have to convince the retailer that your brand strategy and product offering are compelling enough to choose you.

3) Because you will have the least amount of control with a retailer, you can’t rely on the same kind of data you relied on for DTC and e-commerce.

4) Your packaging has to work at retail as well as online. It needs to make an emotional connection — quickly — to the consumer. She doesn’t see just the front of your box or bag in an online search; she’s seeing it in the swarm of similar items on the shelf. The consumer’s decision at retail happens in milliseconds; e-commerce is a more leisurely shopping experience, as someone might browse 20 options before choosing. Straddling both online and offline channels and getting it right will help you win.

If you’re eyeing a shift from direct selling to brick-and-mortar, or your brand is a DTC startup, we can help you make the most of your channels. Let’s talk.

David Lemley

David was two decades into a design career with a wall full of shiny awards and a portfolio of clients including Nordstrom, Starbucks, Nintendo, and REI. His rocket trajectory veered when his oldest child faced a health challenge of indeterminate origin. Hundreds of research hours later, David identified food allergy as the issue and convinced skeptical medical professionals caring for his child. Since that experience, David and Retail Voodoo have been on a mission to create a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable food system for all.

Connect with David

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What Package Architecture System is Right for Your Brand?

August 19, 2019  |  an article by David Lemley

When you add a product to your lineup — a new flavor, perhaps — how easy is it to crank out the package for the new SKU? If you’re considering extending into another category — say, from tortilla chips to fresh salsa — will your existing packaging easily adapt to the new form and the conventions of the other category?

Will you think like a manufacturer or a brand?

Marketing and brand managers often run into brick walls when they try to design packaging for new units. They need more flexibility in packaging as the brand grows; they want a design that’s future-proof. They feel stuck within the constraints of their existing design scheme. They want … well, they don’t know what they want.

How to Know When Your Packaging Isn’t Flexible Enough

In the beginning, when you’re a small brand with a handful of products, it’s easy to develop a consistent packaging system that encompasses your identity, your product’s attributes, and category signals. And it’s easy to match that packaging to your other brand visuals like the website and social media profile. But as you add flavors, special ingredients, or line extend into new categories, for example, packaging design gets more complicated. You need to add copy, claims or certifications.

Then, as you further expand, complexity rises. All of a sudden, your packaging isn’t navigable from less than two feet at retail; consumers can’t tell the difference between vanilla, vanilla bean, and vanilla chocolate chip varieties. You have so many offerings that even color-coding to identify them becomes ineffective.

And when you cross into new categories, what works on the chip bag is illegible on the lid and face of the tub of salsa. Plus, every competitor in the salsa category leads with red, and your hallmark color is blue.

Like your company’s R&D, your packaging design needs room to allow for innovation.

Three Packaging Architecture Systems for Food & Product Brands

Developed as a system, your suite of packaging can accommodate new products and new categories to varying degrees. Let’s look at three key types of packaging systems in BFY food, beverage, and products:

1) Type: Rigid

Examples: RX Bar, Kashi

( RX Bar Image Source: foodbusinessnews.com)

A rigid packaging system incorporates a set library of visual elements — logo, nutritional callouts, flavor/variety naming, product photography, colors — arranged in a fixed way. From product to product, nothing changes except what’s necessary for the consumer to navigate the category.

This system is the most commonly used because it’s simple to execute: a design agency can hand off the visual assets and layouts and the brand’s internal team can easily develop the designs and add SKUs. Rigid packaging systems are often the first set of “clothes” that a BFY brand puts on when it launches, when there isn’t money for beautiful food photography and custom typefaces. It’s plug-and-play.

The disadvantage, however, is that a rigid system doesn’t flex for significant innovation, like a cross-category line extension or a sub-family of new products within the brand. It works best when you’re playing within a single category or a few closely related ones (such as Kashi cereal, bars, and grain-based frozen meals). It can also be difficult for consumers to navigate when you add varieties that are similar to one another, i.e., oats and chocolate vs. oats and vanilla. The shopper will have to pick the product up off the shelf to read the copy or detect the minute difference is coloring to find the variety she’s looking for.

2) Type: Flexible

Examples: 365 Everyday Value, Udi’s Gluten Free

( Udis Image Source: norcalcoupongal.com)

Every private-label brand on the market uses a flexible packaging system, which relies on a fairly standardized architecture by category but allows for modifications to meet category conventions in a group of products. Flexible packaging systems are ideal for brands that cross disparate category lines.

The more categories the brand plays in, the simpler the system should be. The logo, the product name, variety, ingredient icons (like the gluten-free “bug”), and that’s it. It has to be simple so it can easily scale.

The benefit of a flexible system is also its downside: It’s harder to execute because the rules are looser. It’s more difficult for an internal team that doesn’t have serious design chops to adopt the brand look consistently from tortilla chips to body wash; it’s harder to maintain the design quality and integrity across all the brand’s offerings.

3) Type: Bespoke

Examples: Newman’s Own, Bob’s Red Mill, Califia Farms

( Califia Image Source: farmdesign.net)

A bespoke packaging system incorporates a master brand, with a set of design standards for each subsequent category. This works best when the brand is well established and widely recognized, so consumers can easily make the shift across categories. It involves a suite of master brand elements that can be rearranged and still be recognizable.

Over the life cycle of a highly successful BFY brand, it will start with a rigid system, then move to a flexible system as it crosses into multiple categories, finally ending up with a bespoke system when it has achieved category dominance. For example, Califia Farms built its reputation on almond milk, and it retains its core brand identity as it shifts into juices and coffee beverages.

Which System is Right for You?

The right packaging system is primarily a function of your product line, but it also depends on your organizational approach to innovation. If you don’t have a handle on your team’s culture, a partner will struggle to help you.

Does your team think like a manufacturer rather instead of a brand? In other words, “We will only make stuff that can come out of our factory using the exact equipment and procedures we use today. Line extension to us is really flavor extension: simple ingredient swaps in our core products.” If so, a rigid system is your best choice.

Does your team operate like Willy Wonka? Is everything you make satisfying and delicious? “I would love to stay and talk but I am inventing 15 things again tomorrow and cannot be troubled by tactics, systems, or reality.” A flexible system will allow you to pivot from one category to the next quickly.

Does your team see itself as stewards of the brand? “We need a plan that will allow for innovation beyond what we can predict right now. We want to future-proof our brand, but it needs to map to our values and why we exist. We need a system we’ll never have to guess at.” In that case, bespoke is the way to go.

Need help making the best choice for your brand? Let us know.

David Lemley

David was two decades into a design career with a wall full of shiny awards and a portfolio of clients including Nordstrom, Starbucks, Nintendo, and REI. His rocket trajectory veered when his oldest child faced a health challenge of indeterminate origin. Hundreds of research hours later, David identified food allergy as the issue and convinced skeptical medical professionals caring for his child. Since that experience, David and Retail Voodoo have been on a mission to create a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable food system for all.

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How to Translate Brand Strategy Outcomes Into Shelf Science

February 19, 2019  |  an article by David Lemley

In today’s busy world with packed schedules and cluttered retail environments, it is rare that a consumer will stop to pick up a product by a brand they’ve never heard of before or one that’s not already on their grocery list. But how can your brand’s presence on shelf change that?

Given that shopping is a necessity, consumers are always making split second decisions when it comes to food and beverage product decisions. For this reason, your package design is your lead sales person. Packages are working hard in the field every single day to make your brand well-known and profitable. Use this powerful opportunity to both shout on shelf and tell your story in a more conversational tone.

At Retail Voodoo we are always asking ourselves, “Does this package design concept adhere to the 30-10-3 rule?” These are the three stages we define as singular moments a package has to engage a consumer:

  • At 30 feet you need to define the category.
  • At 10 feet you need to make your brand name and story known.
  • At 3 feet you have the opportunity to whisper in the consumer’s ear.

This white paper demonstrates how engaging with consumers on each of these levels is key to establishing their trial purchase.

Once consumers have the chance to actually try the product, all of these pieces should come together for them and ignite the consumer’s individual desire to share your product and brand with other people in their circle. Learning how to achieve engagement and what is important for your package to achieve at each stage will help your package fly off the shelves or into digital carts time and time again.

What Your Packaging Should do at 30 Feet

This is the initial opportunity for your package to attract attention and stop consumers in their tracks. This is a critical stage because here your package has the shortest amount of time to make the most impact.

There are four ways to successfully halt traffic at 30 feet:

Logo or Wordmark

Whether you have a brand mark that everyone knows implicitly (i.e., Nike swoosh or the Apple logo) or you are wanting to make your brand more well-known in the category, using the brand’s logo as the attention-capturing element is always a great choice. This allows your package to define itself as a leader in your category at an instinctual level. A simple, clean logo that is staged properly checks the trustworthiness box for most consumers. When shopping, people will think, “That brand looks confident in who they are and expects people to remember their name.”

Photography

Oftentimes, powerful and eye-catching photography is a great way to stand out in a shelf of many colors and lots of typography. If it makes sense for your product, queuing appetite appeal can be very successful when shoppers have a split second to make a food choice (especially for center aisle purchases like snacks).

In the case of Sahale Snack’s packaging, we created a gorgeous cluster of nuts and fruit that is mouth watering – and visible across the store. When shopping, a consumer will think, “That product must taste absolutely amazing.”

Distinctive Product or Flavor

Another effective way to use your brand to define a retail category is to make the name of the product or unique flavor be the loudest element on pack. This is especially true if you are the first to market on an innovative product or flavor in your category. Take the opportunity to make that known.

Wedderspoon is an example of a brand whose innovative product needed to be displayed. They want to bring Manuka Honey to the masses. So when creating concepts for their new label design, we knew that it would be important to let the words “Manuka Honey” sing louder than their brand name.

An example of a success story in the flavor department would be Dry Soda Company. One of the main factors that set this brand apart from the rest of the crowd in the quickly expanding  sparkling beverage refrigerator are their foodie flavors. By having stylized illustrations of those ingredients be one of the most visible elements on the bottles, consumers can instantly see from afar that their flavors are more than just the typical lemon lime. When shopping, a consumer will think, “That is a product or flavor I have never seen before, and I am intrigued enough to try it.”

Product Benefit

If your product provides a critical benefit to your target audience that can set you apart from your competitors, shout it from the rooftop! A perfect example of a brand successfully doing this is Halo Top ice cream. Hale Top has won lots of new and repeat fans by displaying the low-calorie count large and in charge on their pints. This works because they targeted a consumer who wants to eat an entire pint without ruining their diet. At Retail Voodoo, we call this managing indulgence. When shopping, a consumer will think, “That product delivers on a functional benefit I am incorporating in my diet or lifestyle and is worth my money.”

How to Position Your Product at 10 Feet

Now that the consumer has spotted your package from across the aisle because you helped them navigate the category at 30 feet, you need to keep their attention or risk losing them to your shiny shelf neighbor.

Shout Your Clear Points of Difference

At 10 feet you have a high-level opportunity to talk to your consumer about who you are and why they should believe in your offering. This second level of messaging at 10 feet is where your package has a bit more time to speak, but don’t get crazy and try to say everything about your brand and product on the front of pack. An example of an ideal amount of content on the front of pack would be Loma Linda. To contrast that, brands like Dr. Bronner’s, while utilitarian in their approach, make the consumer read way too much to reach the information they need. When shopping, a consumer will think, “This brand looks different and may be a better choice than my current brand.”

Emphasize Readability

At Retail Voodoo we frequently say that your logo and product name need to be completely legible by middle-aged eyes and quickly understood by a fifth grader. This is where you use size, scale, and depth of field to create a logical reading hierarchy for your consumer. You will want to educate them on the other items that were not your 30-foot hero item. For example, if your logo was achieving shelf shout at 30 feet, at 10 feet you will want to talk about product, flavor, taste, and benefit. When shopping, a consumer will think, “This brand feels transparent and trustworthy because they are communicating clearly.”

Your Final Chance to Spur Purchase: Packaging at 3 Feet

The consumer is holding your package in their hand and hopefully is moments away from putting it in their cart. How do you entice them to purchase? Understanding that a consumer has a set of unspoken communication needs from your brand is the first step.

Invite Them Into Your World

By picking up your package, they have given you have permission to connect with them on a deeper level. Sometimes this leads to making them laugh through clever illustrations or copywriting, or it could lead to helping them understand the science behind your product. This should be an educational moment woven with your brand’s tone and voice. Yakima Chief Hops for example utilized their back of pack to tell a deeper brand story and allow consumers into their hop fields through storytelling. The consumer will think, “This brand really understands my life and values.”

Get Them to Flip It

Unless the consumer is already a power user of your offering, they will read the back of pack before purchase. Ultimately, this is where your brand’s message and voice can truly come to life by living harmoniously with whatever promises your ingredients are making about your product. At this stage the consumer will look at the nutrition facts panel and ingredient deck. The consumer will think, “Not only does this product map to the types of foods I am looking to consume, but their ethos are in line with mine as well.”

Leverage Communication Hierarchy

Anything that exists at the 3-foot rule should be subordinate to the items that drive the 30- foot and 10-foot rules. But this doesn’t mean that all elements are  equal. Your brand’s tone and voice, product offering, and consumer need state will inform decision-making. Knowing what your consumer is most interested in and designing a purposeful user journey that grabs their attention is as important at 3 feet as it would be at 30 feet. Take the back-of-pack design for Living Intentions as an example. We leveraged both copy and an infographic to help the consumer feel comfortable with what the claim “Activated” meant. Making sure that the front-of-pack claims were explained with clarity took precedence over emotional storytelling. The consumer will think, “I now fully trust this brand to deliver on their promises.”

Now that you understand the importance and purpose of all three stages, know that what you choose to do here visually all depends on what your brand feels is most important for the consumer in driving purchase intent. In determining what your brand’s 30-, 10-, and 3-feet elements should be, we find it helpful to make a hierarchical list of what you need consumers to know in order from most to least important before you ever start designing. This provides an easy way to map back to intentions when you take pen to paper to design the pack.

Each brand has its own strategy and unique selling proposition, but it is how and in what order you portray those on pack that can help great products reach multiple digit growth in sales.

David Lemley

David was two decades into a design career with a wall full of shiny awards and a portfolio of clients including Nordstrom, Starbucks, Nintendo, and REI. His rocket trajectory veered when his oldest child faced a health challenge of indeterminate origin. Hundreds of research hours later, David identified food allergy as the issue and convinced skeptical medical professionals caring for his child. Since that experience, David and Retail Voodoo have been on a mission to create a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable food system for all.

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What to Know Before You Take a Better-For-You Brand into the Big-Box World

January 29, 2019  |  an article by David Lemley

Getting product on shelf at a big-box retailer is the holy grail for many better-for-you (BFY) brands. It may be a goal you and your leadership team have been methodically pursuing over time, or perhaps it’s just landed in your lap. (You should be planning for this, if you aren’t currently.)

Perhaps your BFY brand has good traction at Whole Foods and is growing at a small but profitable clip. Then suddenly Walmart or Costco call and want to get your brand on the shelf. Everything about your business — product, manufacturing, logistics, pricing — suddenly changes overnight.

How do you manage the relationship? Retain control of your brand image? Ramp up production? Stay true to your roots?

Here are some strategies for mitigating the risks when you make the leap.

Upscale Grocers vs. Big Boxes: The Channels Are Different

Whole Foods and upscale regional chains like Wegmans or Sprouts are essential markets for BFY brands to provide you enough national exposure and velocity to maintain reasonable growth. It’s relatively easy to get on the shelf at these chains. (In fact, the challenge may be getting out before the retailer replaces you with a competitor or knocks off your product with a house-branded one. Even these upscale channels can be vicious places to compete.)

But what landed you there won’t get you into Costco. Many darling BFY brands have gone into Costco, started out with good velocity, and then disappeared. Why? They were unprepared to compete in a high-volume, bargain-driven environment.

Big box opportunity and the growth it promises is exciting, confusing, chaotic, and scary. These retailers are going to demand the moon from you. They’ll want input on every aspect of your business, from dictating your margins to imposing packaging and product changes to determining who else is in the channel with you.

Before you go into a meeting with one of the big guys, you have to have your brand story, your pricing strategy, your values, your business practices, your margins — all of it tightly nailed down.

A Strong Brand Story Avoids Consumer Confusion

Understand that the audience that shops Whole Foods also goes to Costco, so they’ll expect to see the story of your brand being told in the same way across those outlets. While Whole Foods shoppers are less price-sensitive, club- or box-store shoppers aren’t averse to paying more for products they feel represent high quality for the dollar.

High-end BFY products can thrive in the big-box environment if they maintain a consistent brand story everywhere. Changing your tune to meet a retail channel’s demographic sows confusion and distrust.

In other words, it shouldn’t be a disconnect for consumers to find a high-quality BFY product like yours at Sam’s Club. You need to have built enough brand equity through other channels and on social media that selling at a club store isn’t a negative for your audience.

We don’t recommend making the big-box leap until you have your brand story straight and enough proof — through velocity at shelf and consumer raves on social media — that you can advocate for what the channel might consider a premium price.

The Financial Challenges of Ramping Up Production

This may be the most panic-inducing aspect of making the move into club, big box, or convenience store chains. You need to expand production, and quickly. And if your business is under about $50 million in annual sales, it’s likely that you’ll need to borrow money to make that happen.

Retailers want to know you can support their demands, and they won’t put you in store until they have proof that you can. They might test your product in a region with 200 stores; if it sells well, then you’ll have to immediately triple production to roll out across the entire chain. If you’re unable to meet demand, you’ll get discontinued because you can’t restock empty slots.

That means you have to invest — to build a new facility or buy production time elsewhere — before you’ve got the business. And quickly, because while you’re scaling up, your competitors may be rolling out a similar product in other outlets. While your sales team is knocking on doors, your operations team should be researching backup plans for production.

Managing The Risks of ‘Growth Implosion’

Without a strong brand narrative, an eyes-wide-open view of the opportunity, and clear plans for production, brands that enter the big box space risk falling prey to growth instead of riding it upward. They either can’t scale quickly enough to land the business, or they can’t maintain production to meet Costco’s demand. We call this “growth implosion.”

So prepare — your pricing structures, channel strategy, brand promise, proven velocity, and production — in order to make a bold move. And it’s OK if that preparation tells you that big box isn’t the right place, at least now, for your brand.

David Lemley

David was two decades into a design career with a wall full of shiny awards and a portfolio of clients including Nordstrom, Starbucks, Nintendo, and REI. His rocket trajectory veered when his oldest child faced a health challenge of indeterminate origin. Hundreds of research hours later, David identified food allergy as the issue and convinced skeptical medical professionals caring for his child. Since that experience, David and Retail Voodoo have been on a mission to create a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable food system for all.

Connect with David

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Put a Wrap On It: The Rise of Packaging in Fresh Food

January 15, 2019  |  an article by Diana Fryc

As consumers become more in tune with how and where their food is grown these days, the perception of food packaging has shifted — thus opening the door for brands to radically innovate in design and messaging to entice new buyers.

Shoppers are looking more closely at certifications to ensure products are made with trusted ingredients and best production practices before placing selections into their shopping baskets. Informed by news stories about food and nutrition, they have become more savvy as they shop the center of the store — and the trend has been spreading to the perimeter and into fresh products.

What about produce? Most consumers buy fresh produce in market-style bulk volumes and they have to rely on faith that those products are, in fact, pesticide free, organic, fair trade, etc., as labeled on the shelf tag. Even with those little PLU code stickers on each tomato and signs on the bin of loose-leaf baby kale, there is something not entirely comforting to the consumer that that sticker tells the whole story.

The Rise of Branded and Packaged Fresh Food

And that’s the reason why we’re seeing a rise in packaged produce: Branding, packaging, and graphic design help consumers confidently purchase these products.

Today when I go to my local grocer’s produce section and pick up a pack of baby greens, I’ll see a clean label made with soy-based inks on recycled paper applied to a crystal-clear container made from recycled plastics with the words “Washed 3X,” clusters of certification icons, inviting graphics, and typography — telling me all the right things to ease my anxiety about the product’s origins and safety. The packaging gives me confidence that I’m making a smart, safe choice.

The power of graphic design in produce is exciting. Brands like Organic Girl are leading the charge in fresh packaging and winning consumers over as their go-to choice based on convenience and trust. Designing food packaging has changed the way consumers shop, turning them into label readers with choices instead of label gawkers. Branded produce is bringing life and interest to a formerly quiet department.

The New Fresh Perimeter: 4 Insights

The fresh footprint is getting bigger at retail; it’s not just fruits, veggies, meats, and gallons of milk. Packaged fresh now includes items like snackable cheese trays, hummus and pretzels, meal prep kits, green juices, and more. I’m seeing marketing trends and shopper tendencies that will continue to shape this new fresh packaged category, including:

Farmers’ markets are shaping shoppers’ expectations. Shopping at farmers’ markets is a wonderful experience that makes us feel good about what we are buying and who we are supporting. The opportunity consumers have to speak and deal directly with the source provides a transparency that is hard to match. The trend of fresh in grocery echoes this experience, from the way food is being packaged to the way the retail environment is designed.

Design conveys authenticity. Packaging that shows off the actual food — with windows and clear substrates instead of photographs — takes us right to the farm when we interact with the package. Consumers care about the origin of their food across the fresh category, not just in produce. So a pack of fresh pasta might use classic typography, elegant colors and clear windows showing off the product to make the product feel like it came right from Italy.

Packaging enables convenience. Grab-and-go products especially communicate the freshness and convenience of a healthy, quick meal. Pre-made salads, portion control cheese plates, and serving-sized fruit cups provide alternative meals that consumers can feel good about — and that feel-good messaging (i.e., high protein, low sugar, all natural) is reinforced on the label or wrap.

Sustainability is a concern. Pre-made dinners and delivery meal services are also driving the fresh trend in packaged foods. But as the fresh category adopts bags, boxes, and wraps, a big concern is overpackaging and recyclability. I expect that consumers will quickly start to question how these packaged-fresh brands give back to the environment and their investment in sustainability and fair trade initiatives.

Yes, a consumer might feel weird buying fresh produce in a plastic container. But they’ll feel better about it knowing that Organic Girl puts extra effort into using recycled plastic in their packaging and making their packaging recyclable (consumers who don’t have access to recycling facilities can send their empty packaging back to the brand’s office). That might seem silly, but it absolutely backs up the brand promise of 100% organic, high quality, great-tasting products. To convince a shopper to choose branded spinach over a bundle with a PLU twist-tie from the bulk bin, it’s not enough to tout the quality of the product. Organic Girl goes all-in on purity, nutrition, and sustainability.

I’m not advocating for the produce department to look like a plastic festival. But consumers (and I count myself among them) are adopting a different shopping mentality that emphasizes content over value and that opens up so much potential for innovation in packaging design. The future of fresh may be packaged, but the foundation is more about transparency and education so consumers can make better decisions.

Diana Fryc

For Diana, a fierce determination to pursue what’s right is rooted in her DNA. The daughter of parents who endured unimaginable hardship before emigrating from Eastern Europe to the U.S., she is built for a higher purpose. Starting with an experience working with Jane Goodall to source sustainably made paper, she went on to a career helping Corporate America normalize the use of environmentally responsible products and materials before coming to Retail Voodoo.

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