 | |
Fishman transducers are a renowned name in acoustic amplification. The company manufactures all kinds acoustic gear including preamps, pick ups and imaging pedals. Until about two years ago, most of their products came prepackaged with branded guitars made by other manufacturers. This along with increasing competition from rivals, in an increasingly crowding market, compelled Fishman to increase their number of products and thereby reach out to newer consumers. Now this increasing product base presented an interesting problem. Fishman's products that came in a wide variety of packaging became increasingly harder to comprehend and track by sales clerks, consumers and even retail assemblers.
To overcome this disadvantage, Fishman teamed up with Catapult thinking, a Boston based innovation consultancy to develop a new concept of packing consisting of four outer boxes and four internal trays designed to house their entire range of products. The boxes had a uniform hi-tech look and feel: a black exterior with a band of unobtrusive color - red, orange, blue, or green - indicative of the type of equipment in the box with different end label for each product.
One of its immediate effects was felt in the reduced cost of manufacturing and assembling the packing which increased their profit margins. The company's earlier variety of package designs entailed ordering boxes in numbers that were too small to get volume discounts. But the new design enabled them to order boxes in tens of thousands unlike the earlier runs of 2000-3000 for different products. "The overall result was to make the products easily recognizable for busy clerks, all while reinforcing the brand as a premium, high-end product" says Jason Chambra, Fishman's CEO.
Probably the most important consequence of the packing redesign was its influence on the company's other products. "Surprisingly, the packaging gave us a new sense of who we are," says Chambra. According to him, the newly unveiled "AFX Chorus Acoustic Effects Pedal" is Fishman's first product to apply the simple, high-contrast design thinking of the packaging to the industrial design of the physical equipment. "Packaging essentially became an opportunity to set the change of strategy into motion." says Catapult's partner Jeff Pacione.
Click here for the article
<< Back
| |
|
|
|
© 2006 Catapult Thinking LLC |
|
