Lane: Designing three hardware brands into one

Category: Hardware branding and packaging design

Lane made the strategic decision to bring its sub-brands for door furniture under the Lane brand to generate maximum impact in stores. The newly designed Lane brand had to be fresh but retain brand heritage.

Challenge: Researching the decision maker

The design process for Lane’s packaging didn’t begin with pen and paper or in a computer; it began by standing in hardware stores, watching customers choose door furniture. With couples, we saw that women made the final decision most often. This observation was crucial because the women in Lane’s focus groups disagreed with the men about the design concepts. Because of our in-store groundwork, we knew whose “side” to take.

Packaging designed to rise above the competition

More than any other type of design, packaging has to consider the context. The colour combination that works in a brief could merge with others on the shelf depending on what’s already in-store.

After visiting seven hardware stores, we could see that Lane’s products would blend in with the competition unless we went beyond the brief. The final decision to go further was made when we met the marketing manager and the product manager in-store to look at mock-ups on the shelf where their products would be competing.

Defensive packaging redesign

We also saw how the retailers were arranging brands on the shelf to increase sales of their own-brand door furniture. Because we could deconstruct what was happening on the shelf, we could be tactical in the redesign. As a result, any increase in own-brand sales wouldn’t come at Lane’s expense.

Solution: Branding that can expand

The new branding was seamlessly able to take in the extension of the product range to new categories like Lane Grande, a range of smart locks for which we prepared name and concept packaging for submission to Bunnings.