In today’s post, we wanted to highlight one of the cool projects we worked on as a way of illustrating the importance of attention to detail and design considerations involved in making custom retail displays. Before getting into the details of the display, there’s an interesting backstory which is worth sharing. Our customer Ubiquiti Networks is a global technology communications company founded by 38-year-old Robert Pera. At age 36, Pera was named to Forbes’ list of 10 youngest billionaires in the world. He is the currently the owner of the Memphis Grizzlies and has an estimated net worth of $3.5 billion.
Pera, an electrical engineer by training, started his career at Apple where he tested the company’s WI-FI devices to ensure they were compliant with FCC standards. He noticed that the power devices used by Apple’s WI-FI products was far below the limits allowed by the FCC. He figured out that boosting the power of these devices could significantly increase the transmission range which therefore could provide internet access to areas that telephone and cable companies don’t reach. With $30,000 in personal savings and some credit card debt, Pera left Apple in 2005 to start Ubiquiti Networks.
Pera was a big admirer and student of Steve Jobs. As we all know, Steve Jobs was a perfectionist who had a reputation for maniacal attention to detail. That drive for perfection definitely rubbed off on Pera, and in turn, has become part of the culture and mentality at Ubiquiti Networks. In working with the Ubiquiti team, we couldn’t help but notice the attention to detail and uncompromising insistence on perfection during our POP display project. We’ll be the first to admit that it resulted in a better POP display than what we might otherwise have produced.
The display we created was a 4-ft. glorifier designed to be placed inline in Micro Center stores. The purpose of the display was to showcase and promote the company’s AmpliFi turbocharged mesh home WI-FI system. AmpliFi utilizes multiple self-configuring radios and advanced antenna technology to provide ubiquitous WI-FI coverage in your home. The system consists of a router and mesh points, both of which were incorporated into the display.
We fabricated the display out of expanded PVC which has the advantage of being light, durable, and easy to work with from a graphics perspective. The back panel graphics could have been executed using direct printing, but we chose to print on vinyl and stick it down to the PVC. One of the important design elements was the curved transition between the product platform and the slanted front shelf graphics. Another important detail was the way we created the sides to extend beyond the top of the product platform to hide the edge of the graphics.
Our customer wanted to make the front angled graphics interchangeable so we used magnetic vinyl material and stuck it to sheet metal that we attached to the PVC structure. After an initial prototype, we noticed that the vinyl graphics were showing fingerprints so we added a protective matte laminate finish which solved the problem. Although it is difficult to see in the picture, the mesh points are plugged into 3 live outlets. We built a thin box on the back side of the display which housed the junction box, the wiring, and other electrical components. We secured the mesh points and routers to the display to ensure they would not be stolen.
We worked through multiple iterations with our customer on the graphics and ultimately changed the main text to white so it would pop off the black background. In the end the graphics looked good, but our preference would have been to reduce the amount of text since in our experience most shoppers do not like to read a lot of text and would prefer just to look at pictures.
The design and manufacturing process for this project was intense, particularly given the extremely tight timeframe. But, we learned a lot, as we do with almost any project we take on. We were happy with the end product and so was our customer, which is really what counts. The picture below shows the display in a Micro Center store.
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.