Rebranding and Rewards

A story about my work with Lowe's Holiday Living brand, and the excellent folks at the now closed Seattle branch of RRDonnelly.

At the tail end of last year I was brought onto an excellent team at RRDonnelly to help build the necessary templates and SOP for a full overhaul of Lowe's Holiday Living brand. At first this role was strictly part-time, supporting their existing team in-house with QA and light redesign, but by the time I left I was playing a temporary role as a jr. Art Director, SOP author and AEM manager. I learned a lot, made some great friends, and did work I’m genuinely proud of.

The timeline was tight and the challenges we faced were pretty intense. Within the first month the only other two full-time employees who were assigned strictly to the Lowe’s team left for outside opportunities, putting me on the spot to finish learning all of the details for the client in a very short amount of time. Other employees who knew how to back up the team for Lowe’s carried me for at least a month before I was at full speed, and that’s one of the strongest signs of a good group of people - they were quick and clear to communicate, wonderful at explaining things to me, and great and both asking and answering questions.

Never underestimate the ability to own what you don’t know or feel uncertain about - high level industry is filled with people that would rather posture and fail, dragging the entire company down and then floundering their own way out of it, rather than say in a meeting, “I’m not sure I fully understand this, can I ask some questions?” My team mates at Donnelly, both on my team, other teams, and in my direct management, were outstanding at supporting me - a first-time contract fill-in designer suddenly in charge of carrying this client as best I could.

The work originally involved comparing specific iterations of a design to the source template that communicated the products look and feel. It was often dense with copy details that made a lot of room for text formatting errors or inconsistencies, easy misses in translation positioning and language requirements, and all the classics - barcodes, serial and product numbers, and a rotation of image files that often needed updating by another third party designer.

Mastering this kind of work is pretty straight forward. You get to know the brand just like you get to know a pet - you know where to look for its pee when you’ve been away from it too long, you know what liter or treats needs to be changed daily, weekly, and constantly, and you know what to feed it for the most consistent behavior. Each brand layout has its trickier elements to interpret, so you check those areas more thoroughly as you go along (that’s where the pee is). You eventually catch up to what points of information are unique on each individual file, each series, and each brand (that’s changing the litter), and feedback is the food you give it - in this case we had an excellent in-house system for communicating back to the production team in India what patterns we were seeing in QA.

However, what was planned before my team all moved on to greener pastures and I was left alone, was a full rebuild of the seasonal brands for 2020. Holiday Living is Lowe’s in-house family of themed decorations and accessories that highlight Halloween, Fall, and Winter, as well as other additional celebrations throughout the year. My work was primarily with the big three, however - Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The concepting and brand-build for the design was created by a third party design firm, and the sum resulting components were handed over with a nice guideline laying out the theoretical execution for production.

Donnelly was in charge of completing the production of initial templates that further translated the design guide, and then building all the individual pieces of packaging for the series. We were doing this side-by-side with the excellent design team at Lowe’s, who had the ultimate say on art and creative direction.

What the third party firm gave us was a thorough design idea, and the elements were all there for execution, but there were two major flaws that didn’t reveal themselves until the art hit the dielines.

First, we had an established workflow that was very reliant on matching the build of one package layout to the ‘source’ template - we want the messaging and aesthetics to be consistent, familiar, and crisp. Almost all of the packaging I encountered in QA for Lowe’s was top notch in its ability to be translated from one die to the next. Things scaled vertically or horizontally in ways that were rarely in need of improvisation. But the new guidelines for Holiday Living all had dynamic elements that weren't so easily put into a common practice. Each packaging was decorated with consistent visual flair that tied the holiday together. But these elements were all placed into the layout not in relationship to each other by formula, but in relationship to the overall theme and feel of the packages negative space and messaging. You couldn’t simply scale up one box or circle - you had to look at the package holistically, and fill out the negative space with things that would warm up the design without poking at the customer's attention and distracting them.

Second, we were provided a very specific and limited form of lockup for the logo and product names. At first it seemed easy - you have a set of distinct sizes, a set font-derived spacing mechanic for where to position the logo, and pre-existing type for the copy. However, these lockups quickly found their limits. While most sample packages provided by the design firm were common sense appropriate, the packaging for the Holiday Living line was a vast and varied set of front and side-facing pieces. Almost instantly we found the first flaw - the lockup, when scaled to anything less than 3” tall, started to require fonts smaller and smaller than 6pt. In some cases this was a color font being printed on black background - no press in the world can hit a registration that tight without blurring an already barely legible type. In addition, many of the actual package designs demanded a very narrow or very short primary facing panel.

This meant we were suddenly going from a team that took singular, focused designs, iterated on them, quality checked them, and then output them, to a team that was now finding flaws and challenges with almost every file. If that wasn’t enough, the work of actually generating the templates for production to use was clearly going to be a more complex and time-consuming project than we had originally expected.

And! If that wasn’t enough, the vast majority of my backup was suddenly moved to a new team just as the process was starting! Their new position was high priority and had very restrictive NDA requirements - I was staring down the barrel of doing more, with more complex elements, and doing it almost entirely alone.

So my excellent manager got in touch with my wonderful design agency, and brought in backup. Caroline Smith became our number one template creator, taking the aesthetic of the brand guide provided and filling out those flairs and lockups over a dizzying amount of dielines for the upcoming work. I worked side-by-side with Caroline to interpret and QA the work of the production team as they created their iterations of the templates literally as we were creating them. It was the very definition of building the plane as you fly it.

And it worked! With great effort, a lot of communication, and a lot of faith and direct design support from our leadership, Caroline and I managed to perfect the logo lockups, build an impressive suite of templates, and set a tone for how to place the background flair on every sample dieline we were given.

And if that’s not enough - we did it all while I was writing the final SOP for the process, focused primarily on how to use their custom DAM software, AND training the new team at the home office to take over Lowe’s as a client.

Because, sadly, RRDonnelly announced they would be closing their doors just as this adventure was truly taking flight. The amazing team I worked with has all moved on to different opportunities, or remain on with the special client service that took away most of my backup team half-way through the project. From start to finish it was five fast months in the middle of winter.

I’m really proud of the work that we all did. The ever increasing series of complications that were thrown at us seem almost comical when you look back over it. First my team shrank to just me and anyone with free time to help, then to just me and Caroline, and then the design guide revealed challenges to our automated process and complex flaws of the layout, and then the entire branch was closed. We built the project to functionality, as it was happening, and did so while training the next generation of QA and writing the SOP necessary to sustain the process. Just one of those factors is enough to slow down your production, to beg you to rethink how things should go forward. But the holidays wait for no one! And we took every new challenge that came at us with the same enthusiasm that we had in the beginning.

My new friends at Donnelly, my leadership at the Seattle branch and the team with Lowe’s, and my favorite people at the home office in Elgin, IL, are more than just a feather in my cap or a line on my resume, they’re a reason to know that almost nothing is insurmountable. When the problems get big we get bigger. When work gets complex, we get smarter.

And, best of all, when I strap on my mask and go looking for the parts and tools I need at Lowe’s, I get to pass by a bunch of wonderful designs that I helped get into the world. And that’s just the best feeling.