Slicing it Fine
A maker of kitchen products upgrades its plain blue wrapper.
By Maggie Overfelt

(FORTUNE Small Business) – The back wall of the kitchen section in a typical Bed Bath & Beyond or Wal-Mart features hundreds of gadgets, with three to ten brands of each item. In such a chaotic sales environment, how can you make your avocado slicer--and your logo--stand out? Progressive International, a 70-person maker of food-preparation products based in Kent, Wash., hired Boston design firm Proteus to overhaul its packaging. Progressive wanted two improvements: smaller packaging (allowing retailers to fit more of its products on a display wall) and a more consistent look. Progressive has more than 700 products, and before the makeover, many of them looked wildly different on the shelf. "As new people came in and developed more products, they'd create their own packaging," says Karin Harding, Progressive's vice president of marketing. "No one ever went back to update the old stuff."

After conducting research to gauge consumer buying habits, Progressive interviewed seven design firms and hired Proteus based on its experience with kitchen products. "Their packaging was so dated," says Bill Sterling, Proteus's VP of visual communications. "It didn't reflect what their products deliver in the way of styling and innovation."

Six concepts and 17 months later, Progressive, with almost $50 million in annual revenue, started rolling out the new look. About 100 of its products arrived on store shelves in July 2004, and the last phase should be completed by the end of this year. It's too early to measure the success of the redesign in terms of sales, but Harding believes the new look has already contributed to a small increase since January in the number of retailers carrying Progressive. Production costs have also been cut by 10%, allowing the company to offset the rising expense of plastics and stainless steel without hiking Progressive's prices. Also, the new logo's uniformity has reduced package-production time from four weeks to one and simplified the printing process--Progressive previously contracted with more than a dozen printers but now can often use just one. FSB asked Harding and Sterling to explain the redesign in the pictures at right.