In our latest Innovation Spotlight, we take a close-up look at Foundry's comprehensive solution for designing and rapidly iterating on packaging design where it is needed most — in the context of the retailer’s store shelf or e-commerce web page.
Packaging designs don't live in a vacuum. Once completed and produced, they inhabit a crowded competitive landscape, contending for every set of eyes. Given that it normally takes a consumer just three to seven seconds to choose an item on a store shelf, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brands are in a tight race for notable superiority at the grocery store aisle (and online). Those crucial few seconds have been dubbed the consumers’ First Moment of Truth (FMOT).
In order to make sure that a design will be notably superior during the FMOT, a designer must be able to see how the design will stack up against the competition. In more traditional workflows, a designer would need to create their packaging design in a CAD tool and then produce a physical prototype. From there, they would construct a physical store shelf and place the prototype on it with the competitors’ product around it in order to conduct a consumer study. Time-consuming!
But, with Foundry’s tools, Colorway and Modo, designers are not only able to create a virtual twin of their product (thus eliminating most physical prototypes), they are also able to place it in any context imaginable. Consider this example:
With CAD software (left), you get a sense of the product’s dimensions and overall appearance. But look at what the 3D render tells you (right). Yes, it tells you everything the CAD render does, but it also informs you on:
How does the retailer’s light play with overall packaging design?
Does the label color palette hold up in real-world lighting?
Does the white bottle color subtly attract more attention compared to the competitors’ color choice?
Does the gold enhance/detract from the design in comparison to the other bottles on the shelf?
Armed with this information, a designer can continue to craft their design with the competitive landscape in mind. But, where Colorway’s power also lies is in the fact that designers can rapidly iterate on their designs in real-time, in any context. This means that creating a contact sheet of five, ten, or even twenty variations can take just a matter of moments. These, then, can then be seamlessly communicated to all needed stakeholders and a final design found in hours or days, not weeks or months.
Finally, these virtual prototypes can be set in-context and used in consumer studies. What’s more, as data is gathered these designs can be iterated on as the study is being conducted! In this way, insights from the study can be used and further insights gathered, making the research even more potent.
Download Foundry’s Mastering the First Moment of Truth white paper today to learn more.
This content was sponsored by Foundry.
