Aquaculture Excellence Awards

Throw on your apron, crank the gas and open a bottle of Marlborough Pinot Noir — here are some business cards that belong in a Michelin restaurant, not in a wallet.

New Zealand King Salmon (NZKS) produce a unique breed of Chinook salmon called Ora King. Chefs love Ora King salmon because they are the best. The best taste, texture, colour and size. NZKS approached Downing to create a new set of business cards that looked so good you could eat them. We collaborated with them to come up with the idea of cards that looked like salmon.

To say these cards are complex would be an understatement — hold your breath because we’re about to get technical…
For the back of the cards, we printed black ink for the scales on Curious Metal stock, then embossed the scales for texture. We then ran a Spot U.V. overprint on the scales to make them glisten. On the front, we letter-pressed the Ora King logo onto Curious Skin stock and with digitally printed details. We then laminated the two stocks together and edge painted the cards with orange ink.

Phew!

This was new territory. The printers claimed that we were ‘pushing the envelope of what was possible for a business card’. Even so, they worked hard to create a set of cards that Ora King could be proud of. It’s great when you have suppliers who know and love their craft.

When stacked, these cards look like a cut piece of King salmon, and if you listen closely you can hear them sizzle.

Here’s a tip:
Don’t be afraid to let your personality shine

Small changes creep in and before you know every point where your brand is represented is slightly different.

Good design is focused, respects the limits, and solves more than one problem while not making more problems.

Let’s make everything we do so beautiful people can’t resist it.

Three of Downing Creative Marketing projects won four awards at the New Zealand Pride in Print Awards held at Sky City Auckland on Friday night (May 11). These included 2 Gold Medals and 2 highly commended awards.

The New Zealand King Salmon Ora King Business cards won a gold and highly commended. We wanted to create a business card that looked like salmon skin and when it was stacked up it looked like a piece of salmon. So using a full range of printing embellishments we were able to achieve this and the results were stunning. We partnered with Valley Print in Petone who proved to be just as enthusiastic as us to produce an excellent result.

The Judges said…

“A good business card always leaves the right kind of impact. It’s both a first impression and a lasting brand extension that people need to be compelled to hold onto, and this one fulfills that brief entirely. Combining an old technique with new technology has seen a beautifully produced crafted business card for Ora King Salmon that has showcased the best of both traditional and digital methods for a truly intelligent and impactful design.”

The second award was for the Ora King Presentation folder and it follows a similar thinking as above. This project used a variety of print techniques including blind-embossing, custom die-line, and UV over gloss to achieve salmon skin artwork that had an impact. These were printed by Spectrum in Christchurch.

The presentation folder and business card work seamlessly together to create a finish that is simply impressive.

The Judge’s comments were…

“A perfectly printed presentation folder for Ora King Salmon with many embellishments and a pocket that matched the backing sheet exactly. The job was awesome throughout. Nice clear emboss. A beautiful job and brilliant print! With so many embellishments on this folder, there were many things that could have gone wrong – but nothing had. A superb piece of promotional printing that stood out from the others.”

We also received a Highly Commended award for the New Zealand King Salmon Annual Report. This 100-page publication was a beautiful book presented in a sleeve. It told the story of our client’s successful year of Enabling Growth from ‘egg to plate’, utilising stunning imagery and printing techniques that accentuated this concept. These were also printed by Spectrum.

Our clients at New Zealand King Salmon were highly engaged in both projects. They allowed us creative freedom and encouraged innovation and sustainable practices in all our work with them.

This an example of how a local business can stand out on the international stage by partnering with a client that is committed to excellent results.

NZKS general manager marketing Jemma McCowan says the awards were a tribute to Downing Creative and company staff who had a part in producing the award-winning business collateral.

“At NZKS we are always proud to support. The fantastic results at the Pride in Print Awards have shown once again that we have great talent and superb creative partners we have right here in the Top of the South, as well as the other talented contributors from across New Zealand.”

Omega Plus – Launching a successful supermarket brand.

They had an idea for a new pet food range made with real New Zealand King salmon. This FMCG product, named Omega Plus, would be a vet-quality pet food at supermarket prices. Our role was to position it to be the ‘preferred option’ available in New Zealand supermarkets. This project was very much a partnership with Omega Innovations team at New Zealand King Salmon and Downing.

We did some desktop research and supermarket visits. This was to get a snapshot of our competitors and the competitive environment we were working in.

We created many concepts, developing packaging that would have an impact on the supermarket shelf. We took our preferred prototypes and presented them to focus-groups to discover which design was the most effective. We took a qualitative approach and spoke to smaller groups of consumers to get their reactions and options. We took the prototypes of the pack designs on actual pet food bags and placed them amongst competitor brands. Focus-group participants had to rank the different brands from ‘most-preferred’ to ‘least-preferred’. Unknown to them, Omega Plus was still in the development stage, awaiting their honest judgement and feedback.

Some ‘Shoot from the Hip’ Tips

Setting yourself up to create a successful brand takes a lot of hard work and clever thinking, and packaging design is an important piece of the puzzle.

Here are some of the things that we have learnt:

• Do your research well and gain customer insights before you create and launch your brand and prepare to adapt quickly to these insights. Have a clear idea of your ideal customer and what problem you are solving for them. How are you making their lives better?
• Understand your brand as if it was a person. What is its personality? How does it speak? How does it act? How will customers feel after connecting with the brand? This helps to create brands with depth and leads to creating authentic pack design.
• Have a clear selling proposition that is appealing, credible, and easy to communicate on the packaging. If this clearly shown on the pack it will help your product sell itself.
• Invest in outstanding design that will put you ahead of the competition from the start. An investment in good quality design will add immense value to what profit you can make from your brand in the long run.
• Carefully select the materials you are using as packaging, they have more impact than you might realise. How do they feel to touch? What impact do they have on the environment? What do they say about the quality of your product? Do they have visual appeal on the shelf and in the home?
• Before you commit to printing large quantities, test all packaging materials for how they perform in the manufacturing, distribution, shelf, and storage environments.
• Test your prototypes in the place where they will sell for stand-out appeal.
• Have all your compliance and essential info that must appear on the pack done well ahead of production.
• Allow long lead-in times for the production of packaging as this can take longer than you think.
• Expect that you will need to make alterations to your artwork for your second print run as most new products need to adjust the packaging artwork in some way when it’s time to reprint it.

Nelson art — worth its weight in gold.