Imaginarium is the biggest fun design gift store chain in Brazil. With more than 250 franchises over the whole country, the store sizes vary a lot and lately small stores are opening as much as bigger ones. As new products are added every single day, the stores have a huge variety of products to display and the packaging is critical for the customer to understand each product. In this scenario, this project had to:

The first major problem was to improve the brand graphical translation to the packings. There were very few guidelines for them and the result was every packing as a direct reference of its product. Some consistency was needed to reduce graphical noise in the stores. This noise-reduction brung some visual space to the shelves and each product or seasonal product collection could be perceived independently. This helped sales growth making the product pop on customer sight. 

The second major change was in the design process. The new standard helps to decrease design time a lot. This was crucial in a design team that delivers many new designs on a weekly basis. The new system changed average working hours from 16 to 2 hours, freeing up designers’ time so they could improve the product itself and create new ones. Besides that, the project aims on checkout time reduction due to better organisation of shelves – this is a key value in seasonal sales.

The solution was based on feedback from every single area of the business, ranging from the salespeople and store stocking to warehouse, business planning, architecture, visual merchandising and sourcing.

The packing system has 2 fronts, no back. Every pack has a “product face” and a “brand face”. The product face may differ slightly between each pack but the brand face is almost the same, consistent design. This allows the visual merchandising team to organize the shelves based on collections or specific sales needs.

The brand face is pure Imaginarium. As the brand is seen as a constant surprise for the customers, each pack invites them to imagine what’s inside: “Imagine a mug”, “imagine a photo frame”, “imagine a speaker” and so on. This is exactly what the customers already feel when they are gifted an Imaginarium product. They just can’t imagine what will come out of the box, no matter how hard they try. The surprise is guaranteed as the products are always different from everything else on the market. The chosen color was black as this is the brand main color. This helps to reduce visual noise as the packings can camouflage against the dark grey store shelves.

All the icons used for product information and warnings were redesigned to be used side-by-side with the Geomanist typeface. The icon system is flexible and new icons can be edited and added as needed.

The product face is made to help each product specifically. Color-blocked, it works as a contrasting background with handwritten information about the product and some free-style messages from the designers directly to the customer. Besides that, the product name is displayed on the front ant top faces so it can be easily found in store stocking. 

Here is where the system really came to life. All the packings together had a huge impact on store, cleaning up visual pollution. Visual merchandising team was able to make use of both faces as needed for each seasonal product collection to improve sales.

The project was awarded at the ABF+RDI Design Award in 2018 (packaging category) by the Brazilian Franchising Association. Special thanks to all people from Imaginarium who helped this project happen.