It’s not every day that we get to combine creativity, artistic expression, and fun into the retail POP displays we design and manufacture. Many projects have some of those elements, but it is not an everyday occurrence that all of those factors come together on a single project. But, when they do, our designers are in Heaven. In today’s post, we’ll take a quick look at a heavily branded beer sampling tray, one of the creative shop displays we designed for The Lost Abbey, a San Marcos, California-based contract brewery specializing in Belgian-inspired styles.
Our objective was to create a well-branded, highly functional and cool sampling tray that The Lost Abbey could make available to its customers in a tasting room setting. We started with the concept render shown below.
We wanted to create an interesting structure that could hold 6 sampling glasses. We also wanted to design a very natural and organic piece that offered visual interest but was also very functional. We added a bearing on the bottom to make it spin. We included numbers by each glass hole to help people keep track of beer styles. We wanted to be sure to prominently feature the Lost Abbey cross as the key branding feature.
We took these basic design elements and created a prototype that we built in our Oceanside in-house millwork operation. We cut the parts on our CNC machine and then laser engraved the cross, the numbers, and the branding on the main platform. We used a dark stain for the dividers to create contrast and clear coated the rest of the parts. Our prototype is shown below.
The fun part came in getting the display into the tasting room environment and giving it a try. A few members of our design team took it over to the tasting room for a “meeting.” I guess it was a good meeting since we did not see them for the rest of the day. We always like to field test our displays, and it looks like this one passed all of the usability tests with flying colors.
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.