A couple of weeks ago, Jim Jackson, vice president of design at Boom Island, a design boutique located in a former Studebaker buggy plant in Minneapolis’s North Loop, stepped out for a quick bite of lunch. During the roughly 15 minutes he was out of the office, he approved two project designs for send-out to the clients. He did it by iPhone, of course.
If you’ve heard of Boom Island, it may be because you read about the firm’s package design for General Mills’ new Wheaties Fuel in last month’s Strib. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s probably because it’s been a pretty self-effacing place since it was founded in 2000.
But you have seen its handiwork, even if you haven’t scored a box of Fuel. Thousands of unified, quietly stylish package designs have come out of this 10-person company. Tier 1 retail is the level Boom Island plays on (General Mills, Target, and Best Buy have all been clients), though it’s done design and strategy consulting work for smaller companies (including Spring Lake Park–based Simply Organic) as well.
Boom Island hasn’t made a big boom about itself, in part because they see themselves as collaborators with their clients—which often have strong design sensibilities themselves.
“We don’t design to win awards,” says Jean Wright, Boom Island’s vice president of client services (though its work does win its share). “We design to increase sales and drive revenue for our clients.”
One thing clients like General Mills want now is fast. For most supermarket suppliers, gone are the days of leisurely product development, when months and long meetings were spent agonizing over what fruit should appear in the cereal bowl on the package.
This need for speed reflects or perhaps parallels how people move through the supermarket aisles. As Jean notes, the time a brand on the shelf has to make an impact has been whittled down over the past few years “from 3 seconds to perhaps 1.5.”
Consumer packaged goods companies still use traditional insight techniques like focus groups, but with companies needing to get new stuff to market before their competitors beat them to the niche or category, Jean notes that Boom Island and its clients are relying more and more on “intuitive research”—which can include other avenues of gathering consumer response, such as Facebook pages and online voting and testing. This allows Boom Island and clients to “get a faster read, before we go to market” she adds.
Speed not only reflects the hypercompetitive realities of the retail business. It also mirrors something that nearly every company and marketer is having to deal with: Doing more with less money. Big traditional ad campaigns may still work for some brands, but fewer and fewer have the money for them, especially when it can be difficult to determine if they actually work—i.e., increase sales and brand “connection.” Marketing budgets are seeing no increases; often, they’ve been cut back. But the brass still wants to see results.
And again, fast results. Digital tech, of course, facilitates that, and allows Jim, Jean, and the other Boom Islanders to reach across time zones to clients and the outside photographers and other vendors. So does the multiple capabilities (client service, design, project management) that each of its staffers have, each in different proportions.
“I can look at the Wheaties Fuel box and point to the elements where one of our designers did this, another did that,” Jim says. The age mix in the shop combines the tech savoir-faire and the “trend” consciousness of younger staffers with the experience—which can anticipate slowdowns in the design, production, and approval process and fix them before they occur—of Jim, Jean, Boom Island founder and principal Jeff Schweigert, and the other veterans.
“Ideas build one on top of the other,” Jim adds. “We’re not designing in a vacuum. We try not to be protective of our original designs.”
Back to speed. After the Winter Olympics were over, General Mills wanted to get a few of the U.S. gold medalists on Wheaties boxes. The company got word that gold snowboarder Shaun White, one of those who’d be on the box, would be appearing on Leno the following week. General Mills wanted to get a Wheaties box with White on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show desk—and called Boom Island the Thursday before to facilitate the design. It got the photography and layout done for approval within a day.
Boom Island had a similar fast-forward assignment from Best Buy, which was looking to get stylish gift cards out for a promotion. “Gift cards have had something of a stigma attached to them,” Jim says. To which your blogger replied nervously: “They do?” That seems to be the deal: Despite the best efforts of my fellow shopping sloth-aholics, Jim says most retailers have seen sales of gift cards decline in the past few years.
Not so Best Buy. Boom Island’s designs are a key reason why. Boom Island created different looks for different demographics. For younger customers, they worked with Best Buy to get the designs online and asked younger customers to comment about them via the consumer electronics firm’s @15 Web site.
Good design with an element of fun—always a tasteful gift.
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