Chris' blog

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My biggest project to date was finally completed today, by biggest I’m not exaggerating too, its 5m x 1.5m!!

the company I work for Design-A-Cake recently split its operation into two seperate buildings, giving us room to grow, we split from one unit which housed the whole operation of shop and dispatch, into two units, one shop, and one distribution centre.

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Over the past couple of days I’ve been working on a discount card for use at work,

This card will be handed out at the till point in the shop to members of our loyalty scheme, and entitles them to a discount.

My first brief from my boss pretty much went like this “I need a card, make it cheap, I don’t care what it looks like, I just need some way of determining who gets discount and who doesn’t, at the moment I feel like I have no control over who gets it”

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been a couple of weeks since my last post, so I thought I would share what I’ve been up to at work.

My job at Design-a-Cake couldn’t be more varied as a graphic designer, a few weeks ago I designed an email template for use in newsletters, after that I designed the ebay store we use as one of our trading platforms, last week, I did designs for a new product that Design-a-cake will be selling, it’s an own branded product, which is a concept that the company is used to, having many available in the shop or via the web, but something that I am pretty new to (in terms of design), product, to me has always been this “thing” that other people do, I know how it works, I know how a product comes into reality, I just never thought that I would be part of the process!

The product in question here is a “modelling paste”, I know very little about the cake decorating world, I’m trying my best to learn, and actually, its pretty surprising how much some of the processes, tools and even materials are directly linked to my wargaming hobby, so I’m learning all the time about things, and at the beginning of this project I had no idea what a modelling paste was, now, I have a slightly better understanding!

Basically put, for those of you who like me, have no clue about such things. When designing cakes, there are various types of Sugarpaste, most people think of this as Icing sugar, and typically think of the white stuff that covers a christmas cake.
Thats sugarpaste, and that type of sugarpaste is very soft. perfect for covering a cake with.

If you wanted to make something to stick on the top of your cake, you wouldn’t want to use this type of paste, as it’s so soft, the model would fall apart, so, you may decide to use Modelling paste, which is much harder, meaning you can make things out of it that can sit on top of your take (like flowers, or a car, or well, anything that takes your fancy).

Design-a-cake decided they would make their own range of modelling pastes, and I have been tasked to design the product packaging.

We dicussed things through with our manufacturer, once the amount of the paste per “unit” was decided (50g), and decided upon a clear jar to hold the product, this jar is made from plastic, and will have a white, flat top lid on it, which will be sealed with clear sealing tabs.

We wanted the paste to be visable through the jar, to show the customer the product without the need to open the packaging, which can sometimes be a problem with some of the products available in this industry, where the product is purchased, and used, based upon how it looks. yet to purchase it, it comes in a bland, sealed cardboard box. Which can sometimes cause the customer (and the retailer!) a massive headache, as its trail and error, or even plain guess work, to get the product you’re after.

This is why we decided on a clear pot, as it gives the customer (also the user in most cases), a clear view of exactly what they are buying, before they buy it. It also gives them a resealable pot, if there is some of the product left at the end of the project. also, an issue with some products in the industry.

This clear design poses a problem from a design point of view, as how much can I cover? we need the packaging to be bold, so that the customer knows what it is, we also want them to know that it’s a Design-a-cake product, as its a food product, we also have to put on a list of the ingredients in the product.
From that I took those three elements and came up with a solution. Three labels.

1) Front label, the smallest label, tells the customer what the product is (modelling paste), and the shade contained in this particular pot.

Front Label

2) Top label, this was my favourite label to design, mainly because I’ve never done a circular sticker before! and I was really pleased with how it turned out, This is a circular sticker that is placed on the top of the pot, this reinforces the branding on the pot, yet is very simple in its design.

lid_label

3) rear label, Slightly larger than the front label, as it has far more info to put on it, this label has all of the ingredients on it, and goes on the back of the pot. here it is:

rear_label

with only two of these labels covering part of the clear area of the pot, I’ve managed to squeeze on all of the elements I needed to incorporate into my design, while at the same time leaving enough room to be able to see the product in the pot.
I’ve also been able to make best use of the branding for the company on as many of the surfaces as I can, with the Logo, and web address being shown on all three labels, without overcrowding the overall design.

I’m really pleased with how they turned out, and am eagerly awaiting the arrival of the fist batch to see how they look! (I have to say, its going to be weird photographing a product that I’ve had a hand in designing!)

Hope you’ve enjoyed the post.

Chris

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It’s been one week (pretty much down to the minute!) since I sent out my first mass mailout for Design-a-cake,

If you read my first post on this you’ll know that I sent out 3663 emails, all to individuals who have special attributes which led them to be selected for our mailout (mainly shoppers who are currently active with the business, or are VIP members)

The results we have got back have been absolutely astounding! to be honest I didn’t really know what to expect from the campaign, but I was blown away by the positive responses.

Before I talk about it though, here is a copy of the email as an image for you to look at (i.e. the links will not work), also, a point to note, the people who signed up for the mailout got a discount code, which I’ve blurred out in this jpeg, as its still active, and is only available to people on the mailing list!

First Newsletter graphic

First point to note, I know that this isn’t the most visually pleasing email ever, the future ones will have a lot more time and effort put into them to “tart” them up before they go out, but with the first one, the time went mainly into making the template, once that was done I was pretty much out of time to get the content to a level that I was honestly happy with, so I know, it needs work. But even so, it’s my first one, and I have personally been very happy with the response I have gained from it, and more importantly, my employers are happy with it. And it might sound cheesy, but If my boss is truly happy with my work, then I’m happy.

So. Mailchimp.
Its probably the best thing on the web since the stalkers wet dream that is google analytics. here are a few stats from the campaign so far,
sent emails: 3663
opened: 2139 (59.4%)
unique clicks: 786 (21%)
bounces: 60 (1.6%)
unsubscribes: 18 (0.49%)

The official averages for retail businesses, or hobbies (both of which DAC fall into), say that the open rate should fall between 18-20%, which as a target, we have SMASHED! now, I know, this newsletter was new, so there may have been a certain level of “wow factor” going on, but still, nearly a 60% open rate is fantastic, and with only 18 unsubscribes, I feel like I’ve defiantly done something right.

The click data told us which of the links were actually used in the email, which will help me to figure out what to place where in the next email, and what products were popular and which no one was bothered about.

The data we managed to gather as the customer was leaving the email was totally amazing, but, unfortunately  the info gathering ends once the user actually gets to the site.
The customer might click one link in the email, then spend a whole hour browsing the links on the site, then place an order, or they might click one link, think “meh, not that bothered” and then leave, and I have no way of tracking this (yet…)
so, to help with this, and as a little reward to people who opened the email, we put in a discount voucher.
This gave the user a “real reason” to open it, they get something tangible  out of the experience of reading my email, but it also gives us a good indication of how well the email has performed. (after all, its a retail business, its all about the coin at the end of the day, right?) We can’t tell from the discount code if the customer was planning a purchase anyway, and just took advantage of the opportunity to save some cash, or, they weren’t planning a purchase, and this persuaded them to, and there will have been people who got the email, were inspired to make a purchase, but didn’t use the code (there are always a few, dunno why, but there are!), and, there are people who get the same level of discount, or higher, who may have been persuaded to make an extra purchase because of the email, but don’t show up in the stats, as their discount code overrides the email one.
So, because of this I decided it was “fair” to count all email discount codes from the email as “new” customers, who were only ordering because of the email.

The money that the discount code pulled in (and total number of orders) was far beyond my expectations, I’m not going to divulge the full info, it wouldn’t be right, as it is not my business, so discussing its finances would be improper and disrespectful to my employer, but, I can safely say that it defiantly paid for itself, and was a worth while endeavor.

Its been a really positive experience for me, and its only going to get better from here, as I now have a basic template that I am happy with, so I can use my time to get the look of the email just right.

For the next one I will be hopefully trying to source a tutorial from one of the employees of the company (a fair number of the people who work for us are cake decorating pro’s, so getting them to write a tutorial shouldn’t be a problem), which will give the reader a nice, free article to read which they may otherwise have had to purchase a magazine or book to get the same info.

I have “big” plans for the email campaign, and plan to run it on a tri weekly basis, which gives me enough time to collate some data from the last one, and gain new material for the new one.

In conclusion, I have learned a vast amount about email design from this experience, and not only that I’ve learned a lot about the business I work for. I’m very happy with the results that the campaign has given us, its helped me learn a lot, and given me a great deal to think about for future email campaigns.

Thanks for reading.

Chris

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Today I launched my first email mailout campaign, using mailchimp, for my work (design-a-cake),

I’ve been working on the template for a while now among other things, but, today I actually sent my first campaign out, to 3663 people, it was pretty daunting, these people are real customers of a real business, and they are now looking at my email.

I use mailchimp to send out emails for many reasons, the first and most important one, my beautiful fiancé told me to use it, but also because it gives great stats on your emails, meaning that instead of just sending out a shot in the dark and hoping for a reply, I can see exactly what impact my campaign has had on people.

I can see who has opened the email and who hasn’t, then get a pie chart giving me data about the amount of opens, clicks, unique opens and unique clicks, where in the world these people are who’ve opened my email, what urls they clicked on when it was open and a whole host more info.

The data we can collect will be invaluable, we’ll be able to see in real time whether or not its worked, and relate these to sales directly, to see if its had an impact on the business or not.

Mailchimp also gives you the option to have signup forms on your facebook fan pages, which is great, it was quite simple to set up, within an hour or so of my form being live on facebook I already had people using it! which is great!

I made a couple of graphics, one for Design a cake and one for max merch to tell people about the newsletters being ready. here are the graphics:

facebook

facebook advert

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way back in 2007, I filmed a Band called Renegades play in Manchester, they were a Rage against the machine Tribute band, who wanted to get their gig filmed and turned into a DVD.

Unfortunately, the project was never finished, but here are a couple of photos of the menus for the DVD, and the prototype DVD label itself:

renegades menu 2

renegades menu1

DVD label

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Over Valentines day I made a graphic for the shop, I was pretty happy with it, it just went up on the screen in the shop, as we didn’t really do much for Valentines.

here it is:

Valentines Poster

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In January at Max Merch we had an “event”, its a bit like a sale, only it sounds way more posh.

So naturally, I made some graphics to go up in the shop.

The ones below are the A3 sized posters, there were 150cm x 50cm banners too, but I dont have a jpeg of those to hand.

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In January 2011 the government raised the VAT here in the UK from 17.5% to 20%, at Max Merch we didn’t raise our prices.

So I made a poster to tell people. here it is:

No VAT increase poster

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This sticker has as yet not been used, but is intended to be a return address sticker for all mail sent out by the business, or if ever we need to put our address on anything.

sticking with the running theme for the brand, nothing too special, its the same size dimentions as the royal mail’s return address stickers, purely because I had one next to me when I was asked to design it.

Max Merch sticker