Nina Alter · designer + maker + thinker + user

Packaging design that would be capable of "merchandising itself" on generic retail fixtures in family-owned surf shops, big-box sports retailers, and at tradeshows.

Key Challenges
• Clear and loud brand presence among competitor brands, on messy and often unkempt sales floors. Kind of a no-brainer, with a budget that didn't allow for foil-stamp printing or even 4-color printing (as a whole aside from both of the prior being generally boring, anyway).
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• A clean and uniform method of presenting key information that customers look for when deciding which box to pull from the stack. A 'nice to have' that got approved, were the 2 custom die-cuts: the hole in the boxes and the hangtag hook/hole. The die-cuts made it significantly easier for customers to pull specific items from stacks or straight-outs, without creating stack-o-lanches for salespeople to then have to clean-up.

Results
The inexpensive glue that was approved in the manufacturing contract, melted in the extreme heat inside the shipping-containers, in storage for a month on dry-docks in Thailand prior to making it onto the container ships for export to the US. This made for some very grouchy customers, irate that they had to pay employees to glue-stick reattach the peeled-off labels back-on.
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After the irritation wore off from that snafu, retaillers were thrilled with the ease of organization the packaging provided: customers were easily able to find what they were looking for without requesting sales assistance, and employees were able to both maintain neat displays and clean-up after a rush of customers, with much less time than with competitor packaging. Likewise- shopkeepers thought it was darn snazzy, and they appreciated that the O'Neill section of products were clearly distinct from other brands- without the requirement of extra merchandising materials needing to be purchased or stuffed onto already crammed sales floors.