William Bomer, Managing Director of Kingsdown Water was aware of the risks when he decided to overhaul the look of the company’s mineral water brand. But Bomer wanted to take the gamble to generate new revenue streams: because although sales were strong at mid-level restaurants, bars, clubs and hotels, Kingsdown was having trouble getting its mineral water stocked by operators at the top end of the market.
'We didn't carry out official market research, but anecdotally buyers from exclusive venues were telling us that although the bottle looked alright, it wasn’t quite smart enough for them,' explains Bomer.
He concedes that the design, which the company had had for six years, was starting to look a 'little tired.'
'Every product needs freshening up every so often,' he adds. So Bomer decided to employ a design consultancy to reinvigorate the company's core product and give it a more contemporary feel. Design specialists Lewis Moberly were called in to oversee the project and Bomer, who says that he likes and is interested in design but admits that he had previously had little exposure to working through a design project, was heavily involved in the redesign right from the briefing stage onwards.
'I have strong views and I know exactly what I don’t want,' explains Bomer. 'Some design agencies get clients who come to them and say 'I'm in your hands' but I say to them: 'Give me some ideas and I will tell you which direction to go in.'
After the brief had been issued Lewis Moberly came to Bomer with three inital concepts but he immediately knew that they weren’t quite right, so he asked them to come back with some more ideas. In the second batch there was one particular design that he knew instantly had fulfilled all the criteria.
'It was unfussy and simple yet at the same time it was smart, sophisticated, had clean lines - and there was a certain purity about it which is important when your product is something like water,' says Bomer. He took the new designs to a number of Kingsdown’s key accounts to make sure that they were acceptable to existing customers who all gave the proposals the thumbs up.
The next key stage moved the designs from 2D to 3D, says Lewis Moberly’s Strategic Planning Director Hilary Boys. 'By creating highly finished 3D mock-ups of the new design we could all see exactly how the bottle would look through 360 degrees - a critical issue given that it will be seen most often on a restaurant table and potentially from every angle,' explains Boys.
One of the key elements of the new design was the addition of a silver crown to the company identity, which added stature and also provided a visual reference to the name. Another important feature was a better use of the bottle’s plastic label. 'The label makes use of one of plastic’s great benefits – transparency,' says Boys. 'Highly evocative, it shows the chalky hills of the North Downs rolling from white and semi-translucent layers through to a transparent sky, suggestive of the water’s provenance and natural purity.'
The new bottle, which hads different coloured caps to differentiate still and sparkling waters, has proud high shoulders and worked out to be cheaper than its predecessor - an important factor in a margin-squeezed business. 'We expect to give all clients help with production issues and with smaller companies we tend to spend more time doing this as they often have fewer internal resources,' explains Boys.
'On this project we spent a lot of time looking at East European bottle suppliers in an effort to get the cost of the bottle down but still meet the technical brief with regards to bottle sizes, glass weight, ability to withstand the pressure of the fizzy water and volume per annum.'
The cost effective new-look bottle was a product that had broad appeal. 'One of the brilliant things about this design is that it rides two horses at the same time,' says Bomer. 'It helps that we’ve got a traditional English name and that we incorporate the crown, which gives it a grown-up, establishment feel. Yet at the same time the layered mountain effect makes it look modern.'
To underline this broad appeal he cites the example of two customer wins - one to a quintessentially English hotel who loved the new design as it was smart and exuded an air of establishment and the other to an ultra-trendy restaurant group who loved the bottle’s stylish contemporary look.
Bomer has been blown away by the impact that the new design have had during sales pitches. 'You just pop it on the bar and it speaks for itself - we don’t even have to sell it,'he explains.
The company’s sales figures bear this out. In the first eight months after brand was relaunched the value of sales were 34% up on the same period in the previous year. This was 50% above target and the volume of sales in the same period increased by 31%, 25% above target. More importantly the conversion of customers at the top end of the market increased five-fold, with top restaurants such as Christopher‘s, Pied a Terre and Benares now stocking Kingsdown water.
Bomer says that given the chance to do the project again he wouldn’t change anything and he speaks in glowing terms of Lewis Moberly’s professionalism. 'They were very good and they talked a normal language rather than bringing in lots of technical design speak.'
He may indeed be calling on their services in the near future as he’s currently considering how design could help the company counter the recent negative publicity surrounding the mineral water industry.
Bomer is also currently working with the company’s label producer, which has a 'sophisticated internal design team,' on the development of a logo to be accompanied by the slogan 'Kingsdown for clean air.' The company website, which was redesigned by Lewis Moberly along with stationery, signage and sales brochures to reflect the brand revamp, will also include content where visitors can read about Kingsdown’s green initiatives.
At the end of this project Bomer says that he is 'conscious of the power of design for commercial benefit.' Most companies would drink to that.
