Nusa Kitchen, which launched in 2004, found that every year during December its sales would tail off as customers used up holiday days, went on Christmas lunches or brought packed lunches to work in an effort to save money. In contrast, during the summer months Nusa Kitchen tended to attract lots of new customers who bought its prepared salads, but the company wanted to make them aware of the fact that it was primarily a soup company.
Business co-owner Mark Cox knew that he needed some promotional material but that he lacked the skills and resources to create it in house, so he called on the company’s design team of choice, Thirdperson. The designers were based in office space above Nusa’s shop so Cox felt they’d have a head start over other firms as they already knew the brand on a day-to-day level.
And Thirdperson had also helped Nusa undergo a name change. It had originally been called Soupacific but Thirdperson suggested the word ‘kitchen’ should be an essential part of the new name to take advantage of the firm’s equity of home cooked food. Nusa Kitchen is a family owned fresh food supplier and these distinctive qualities should be used as selling points insisted the designers. Apart from a successful new name, this process had given Cox a strong grasp of what design could achieve for him and how to talk to the designers about the new marketing project.
‘During our initial meeting I outlined what the problem was in simple terms and they came back to me with a number of different proposals that included things like ‘buy one, get one half price’ campaigns,’ explains Cox.
Most of the concepts were traditional point of sale solutions, but the idea that got him really excited was a proposal to enhance the pots that hold the company’s range of winter soups. Tom Collins, Senior Designer at Thirdperson explains how they came up with the idea that got Cox hooked. ‘We were already kicking around ideas about winter collections and fashion, and one day when I popped out for lunch I saw someone eating from a standard Nusa soup pot and I realised that it would be really striking if we could make the pot the star of the show,’ says Collins.
Working closely with freelance copywriter Tim Gow, the design firm came up with a series of printed sleeves, that could be slipped over existing packaging, bearing high resolution photographs of knitted patterns with the label ‘Handmade by Nusa’ emblazoned on the side. These would be cost-effective because they weren’t an entirely new pack and could be made from materials that didn’t need to have all the heat and moisture resistant properties of soup pots. Also, batches of the company’s everyday packaging that they’d already bought, wouldn’t sit unused. They’d simply be made festive with a woolly jumper print cover.
Copywriter Tim Gow says Nusa’s brief was ‘relatively straightforward.’ They needed to raise awareness of their soup to sell more soup. ‘To do this we simply said how well crafted, lovingly made and gorgeous Nusa Kitchen’s soup is. With the copy and design message, the trick was to express these emotional qualities and real benefits – the soup’s warming, comforting and natural properties – in a way that immediately encourages people and convinces them of the product’s intrinsic values.’
As soon as he saw the concept Cox knew that he was onto a winner. ‘I loved the winter sleeves idea and so did our customers. We had some people coming in who wanted to collect all four different patterned pots so they would request different designs. We even heard that some customers were using them as pen holders in the office,’ he says.
The winter warmer, ‘Handmade by Nusa’ soup campaign ran over a 12-week period from late 2006 into early 2007, and during December alone soup sales were up by 26% compared with the same month the previous year.
The ‘Winter Collection’ campaign has had a more lasting impact on Nusa Kitchen. It won a silver in the point of sale category in the Design Business Association’s Design Effectiveness Awards 2007 and the relationship between the Nusa and Thirdperson design is still going strong. Nusa has just opened a second kitchen and called on Thirdperson’s expertise to help it with the launch promotional material. ‘They are a great client to work with,’ says Collins. ‘They don’t have a lot of money to spend on marketing but they understand the value of design and if we present something to them that we genuinely think will work, then more often than not they will go along with it.’
