How better UX packaging design increased company’s sales

With this project, it wasn’t merely a new glossy logo that propelled the company forward. Instead, the new overall graphic design changed the rules of the game, saved the consumer, and helped the company in a stagnating field boost its profits by tens of percent. In other words — learn why the redesigning of chemical product labels is the most entertaining thing a graphic designer can do.

Bochemie is a traditional Czech company that has been developing products for timber treatment for some 50 years. Bochemie exports its products to 11 European countries, so this is no local business. Products get redesigned every five years (competitive companies do the same). This might explain why your average consumer may not be able to recall any timber treatment product labels. For this reason, I decided during the bidding process not to redesign the logo, so that consumers would not be confused by constant logo changes. The original logo did not need any freshening up, so my task was to retain as much as possible of the Bochemie label, font, and color.

As I tried to solve the mysteries of timber treatment, I was having a hard time making sense of the different product types:

OPTI F, QH HOBBY, QB PROFI, PLUS I, PLUS I APP, BLUESTOP …

Did you manage to get to the end of the list? Would you be able to tell by name what each product is used for? You wouldn’t, right? Well, same here.

This is when poor old Mildred arrived on the scene. As a designer, I have to research the field before doing my job. But when a week has passed and I still can’t make sense of the company’s portfolio, I wonder what the customer must feel like. A customer doesn’t have a week to buy a product — they only have about three minutes. Being a UX designer, I turned to the marketing team and we went a bit further and created the imaginary figure of “Poor Old Mildred.” If she can understand the product, then anybody can. Our old Mildred doesn’t care a bit for chemistry or marketing names. She can’t see very well, so she’s only willing to give us about three minutes of her time before she starts seeing red and stomps out of the store, murmuring something about university degrees in chemistry. Mildred’s orders are clear: legibility, clarity, simplicity.

Nine colors no more

The original design of Bochemie used color-coding to differentiate between each and every one of their nine products. In the drafting stage I decided to strike off pink and orange as they are too romantic and are irrelevant to the field. This left us with only a few bright colors to work with. Sure, we could have chosen various shades of blue and green and hope that the consumer would be able to make out the difference. But Mildred doesn’t want to hope — what she wants are simple and clear labels. So I came up with the idea to get rid of the names altogether and sort the products into two or three basic categories according to their primary function. Each category would be assorted a color of its own. The enlightened marketing department agreed and we managed to come up with three categories and their respective colors:

PREVENTION (against insects, fungi, mildew, etc.)

ERADICATION (for timber that has been infested)

FIRE PROTECTION (special fire-retardant care that has different standards)

Instead of nine products, we have three product types that will further be differentiated by their yield — how many square meters a container covers. Hell yeah!

Is there a mildew icon?

Do you know? There isn’t? Is there a point in creating one? Does it make sense to try to push through something that’s not intuitive and won’t go anywhere without everyday visual contact and millions invested into advertising campaigns? Mildred agrees that a mildew icon is superfluous. In order to liberate the label from visual obstacles, we decided to part with symbols that communicate very little and make the label difficult to read. Instead yield, i.e., the number of square meters a container covers, becomes easily visible. Yield is also reflected in the price so that upon scanning the price and price-yield ratio, Mildred can readily choose the product she needs.

Before the redesign (left) and after (right)

Does a timber treatment product need a picture of timber?

After several discussions with the client, we decided to do something different than most of the competition. Goodbye tree growth rings, textures, photos of log houses, goodbye pictures of happy people painting fences. What motivated us was again straightforward communication:

• In a vast majority of cases, this product is placed in a section where it cannot be mistaken for oil or gas.
• A picture of timber communicates nothing about the specific use of the product (Insecticide? Against mildew? Just prevention?).
• Miniature pictures will not help Mildred find what she needs. She will either go to the timber section, or be directed there by the store clerk.

From the perspective of graphic design, we had two options. One was to make the timber motif rather low-key and decorative, in which case it would have zero communicative value. The other was to make it eye-catching, which would reduce the space for communication of information that actually has some value — like the function and yield of the product. Bochemie has enlightened management, who weren’t afraid to leave the motif out. Old Mildred is grateful to them to this day.

The timber motif was kept only on a small sticker on the top of the packaging where it shows the color of the chemical (colorless/green/brown). It’s a universal characteristic of such products and is used by most of the competition, so it wasn’t the right place to stand out. Rather we decided not to complicate things for Mildred. We don’t want her to be disappointed when her husband paints the fence a ghastly wrong color. We’re not building the brand so that a customer brings home an unusable product.

No room for “like / dislike”

During the creative stage of the process, all the various elements of the label appeared and reappeared. Cooperation among the technologist, printer, marketing team and me as the graphic designer always played a crucial role. Everything had to be rational and effective, so we never communicated in terms of childish exclamations of “like” and “dislike.” Cooperation was smooth and fast — even after some changes in legislation at the end of the year, which forced me to incorporate hundreds of comments. The saying that a graphic designer should never use anything that cannot be rationally justified has proved to be damn right.

Comments on other visual elements

• After a fierce battle with the typesetter, I managed to reserve some space for the marketing team’s idea to include a self-explanatory guide on how to prepare the solution. Happy Mildred doesn’t have to decipher the fine print anymore and can get the job done in no time.
• Typography is not enough for an eye scanning a shelf. So I added a simple border that is in line with the visual style of the newly-established Bochemie Wood Care Company.
• The original product names were retained for easier communication among insiders, but have been marginalized.

A simple how-to on the backside of the packaging.

Customer care on every label

Our old Mildred is satisfied — it only took her three minutes to find what she needed. Three minutes were enough for old John back at home to figure out the instructions on the back of the label and to prepare the solution. Next time, they will just need to remember any part of the label or they can simply find it again easily. Nothing difficult — customer care is embedded in the label itself.

And it works! At the end of the redesign process we employed a specialized agency who did a market survey for us to get a quick feedback. We got very good results but the best thing came after the release. Rough data from the first season following the redesign demonstrates that there are reasons to be happy: both for marketers, who find new labels much easier to communicate, and also for the customer. Through the combination of radical uncluttering of the label, safer design of packaging, and changes in distribution, the company has managed to boost its profits by tens of percent. The field of timber treatment is not accustomed to big changes and revolutions and so I’m grateful for having been able to be a part of it!