Printed Pack Prototypes Faster And At Lower Cost

Celeritas has developed what it believes to be a revolutionary new global on-line 3D image service that will overhaul the speed and cost taken to develop new brand and packaging designs.

Celeritas has developed what it believes to be a revolutionary new global on-line 3D image service that will overhaul the speed and cost taken to develop new brand and packaging designs.

The Manchester (UK) IT and design company said that it has created Brandsauce where a 3D digital copy of a printed pack can be manipulated to change size, orientation and perspective, so that the client company can appraise all aspects of proposed designs.

Brand owners' images are held in a secure private on-line database exclusive to the brand owner by Celeritas and they can be accessed via a password from anywhere in the world 24 hours-a-day, 365 days a year, without searching for an up to date image on a CD.

Alternatively, a secure 'public' database for authorised users can also be established.

All products are updated and managed by the Brandsauce team.

Karen Steele, the sales and marketing manager of Celeritas, said: "This is such an exciting concept and although we only launched in March, we are already working with a number of blue chip companies.

We are also dealing with prominent advertising and marketing agencies who particularly like it from a prototyping angle, as they can now market and advertise a product prior to it hitting the shelves." She added that the key to the service and the technology is that its speed and flexibility allow all parties in the brand ownership circle to collaborate almost 'live' on-line to reach early decisions, radically accelerating the speed a redesigned pack or a new product can reach the marketplace.

Steele further explained: "What we do means each specialist involved in different aspects of the brand and packaging development and presentation can see the impact and effects of what they feel they need from their perspective on the overall cohesiveness of brand image presentation.

That way, every manifestation of the brand, from pack design right through to every aspect of supporting retail and marketing imagery can be more integrated much more quickly." In terms of pack development, she added that the Brandsauce service is also ideal for focus groups prior to new product launches, with the real ability to represent new products in the form of quality, high resolution images.

Brandsauce can also print in 3D and the system can take any native file from any system and develop designs from data supplied.

Brandsauce believes that its form of pack prototying offers many benefits over current photography and packaging modelling methods.

The Celertias head of 3D design, Chris Callaghan, explained: "Once we have geometrically modelled a bag of crisps or a carton, for example, we have, in essence, modelled every product that comes in such packs.

All we do is resize the pack's 'skeleton' and wrap new artwork around it very quickly.

That makes our system ideal for prototyping, as we can model the product and create the high-resolution image for marketing purposes to generate awareness before the product exists." And Callaghan continued: "Readily downloadable images that are stored in the brand owner's or retailer's own secure on-line library on our system, can also be made immediately available to enable brand owners and retailers to react quickly to in-store promotions and rapid, short call-off marketing opportunities." Users of the system can virtually 'pick up' a pack of any product, turn it through 360 degrees and at any orientation, zoom in and clearly read the label, the ingredients and the fat content of the product, for instance, instead of clicking on a secondary text box for more information.

The Brandsauce system would then enable the pack image to be duplicated to 'stock' supermarket shelves to provide a high-grade virtual reality merchandising image so that brand owners can check on-shelf impact and presence at point of sale.

That would also extend logically through to the design and production of all manner of point of sale material from shelf-edge labels to free standing special POS displays, banners and posters, for instance.

The same images could also be used at a high quality resolution for those outlets that use AV promotional techniques and plasma screens, for instance, said the company.

Callaghan added: "If an additional product is added in to an already existing range, then there is no need to photograph it, if we already have the model.

So, there is no more retouching of images in Photoshop and images come already cut out from the background so it is simply a case of dragging and dropping the image.

The potential saving on product photography is enormous, with no more courier fees, no retouching, no reshoots, and we provide the ability to set a product at any angle, or indeed a whole batch of product." And Karen Steele continued to explain the major benefit of Brandsauce and the company's ambitions to be a global on-line image source.

She said: "We aim to be the number one in providing a truly 3D global on-line image source for all major brands.

Images are stored on our super computer that is at the core of our technology.

That makes all images available to all authorised personnel either in-house or in third party supply companies.

The user can set up their own bespoke shots and have the high-resolution image back within a very short space of time in any file format.

One high resolution image is created (per product - not per variant), which can then be saved in various formats to be used in any marketing material or point of sale without any loss of quality.".

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