We love designing and manufacturing cool custom POP displays. It’s always great to work with a company that has an innovative or interesting product that also has a unique set of merchandising challenges. Our design team brewed some extra strong coffee and really sank their teeth into this display project. Check it out.
Our customer BlissLights is an artistic lighting company that offers a line of unique patented light projection technology products. We found that learning about multiphase diffractive holographic optics and light projection technology was not only interesting, but it served as a way to impress our friends at cocktail parties.
Our customer had a tight deadline and had been down the road with another POP firm that was unable to meet their objectives. Given the short timeframe, we designed a display that could be manufactured in our shop in Oceanside, CA.
Aside from the budget and timing challenges, we had to be able to create an attractive display that offered a unique user experience and showcased our customer’s products. The floor display needed to hold inventory while also demonstrating our customer’s light technology. We made the base and the bottom shelf portion out of MDF with a white melamine finish and white edge banding. The top part of the display needed to be designed in a way that could really draw the customer in and capture the customer’s imagination. We decided to use 6MM sintra (expanded PVC board) as the primary structural material, but after our initial prototype we decided to upgrade to 12MM sintra to make the unit stiffer. We had no problem heat bending the 12MM material.
We digitally printed the back panel graphic and added side clear acrylic panels with silk screened branding. We also added a screen printed PVC header sign and a front-facing brochure holder. Then came the electronics. We added UL-listed wire harnesses and 3 switches so our customer’s lights could easily be installed and operated at the store level. We also created a dual-purpose cut-out location on the base of the top portion of the display. Our customer wanted some displays to have a 7” digital media player which we installed in conjunction with a built-in motion detector. The video content was designed to show the product in action with all of its magical effects. The content was very visual and played with no sound. It served its purpose of engaging the customer. The majority of the displays did not get digital media players so we used a graphic to occupy the cut-out space. The graphic had to look like it belonged, and it did.
We also need to make sure the units could ship and get to the stores in one piece. For shipping, we separated the bottom and top portions of the display and shipped them on a pallet along with a simple set of assembly instructions.
This project was both fun and challenging for us as designers and as a manufacturer. More importantly, we think it will help our customer sell a lot more lights.
Jim Hollen is the owner and President of RICH LTD. (www.richltd.com), a 35+ year-old California-based point-of-purchase display, retail store fixture, and merchandising solutions firm which has been named among the Top 50 U.S. POP display companies for 9 consecutive years. A former management consultant with McKinsey & Co. and graduate of Stanford Business School, Jim Hollen has served more than 3000 brands and retailers over more than 20 years and has authored nearly 500 blogs and e-Books on a wide range of topics related to POP displays, store fixtures, and retail merchandising.
Jim has been to China more than 50 times and has worked directly with more than 30 factories in Asia across a broad range of material categories, including metal, wood, acrylic, injection molded and vacuum formed plastic, corrugated, glass, LED lighting, digital media player, and more. Jim Hollen also oversees RICH LTD.’s domestic manufacturing operation and has experience manufacturing, sourcing, and importing from numerous Asian countries as well as Vietnam and Mexico.
His experience working with brands and retailers spans more than 25 industries such as food and beverage, apparel, consumer electronics, cosmetics/beauty, sporting goods, automotive, pet, gifts and souvenirs, toys, wine and spirits, home improvement, jewelry, eyewear, footwear, consumer products, mass market retail, specialty retail, convenience stores, and numerous other product/retailer categories.