The continuously increasing share of online sales, new guidelines for sales and shipping via Amazon and the in-house Gardena online stores: Many reasons required the market leader for practical gardening products of all kinds to optimize the packaging design of its shipping boxes.
Gardena delegated this challenging task to us, with a set of specifications and requests that we wanted to meet 100 percent – and did.
It is due in no small part to the Covid 19 pandemic that consumers are increasingly buying garden supplies online, along with numerous other products. Home improvement stores have repeatedly been temporarily closed in some areas – so it’s no wonder that amateur and professional gardeners alike have been using the Internet to gear up for their projects.
In general, a change in purchasing behavior has been apparent for many years – more and more customers are shopping on the World Wide Web. This in turn means that even for a renowned brand like Gardena, the share of e-commerce sales is steadily increasing.
Added to this is Amazon’s new “frustration-free packaging” approach: Since 2021, the mail-order company has been asking its partners to deliver items already ready for shipping.
In addition, the Gardena company also wants to sell and ship its products via its own online stores in the future.
Taking all this into account, it was clear to those responsible at Gardena that it was time to renew the packaging design of the shipping cartons. The company turned to us with the task of creating a functioning and all-around convincing Gardena packaging corporate identity for a wide variety of products. Specifically, the new packaging was to
– meet the requirements of eCommerce shipping
– be simple but effective – i.e. cost-efficient and universally applicable – and
– say “Gardena”, convey “Garden” and contain the claim “Realize Your Gardening Dreams”.
Our task was to develop a single-color design for a 6-page cardboard box that creatively and authentically reflected the Gardena brand along with its values. The motifs had to be placed on the carton in such a way that shipping labels and packing tape would not cover them in an unfavorable way during use. In addition, the packaging design had to be applicable to many variations – i.e. various sizes and materials – of already existing logistics boxes. Gardena also wanted a complete design guide that the repro house could use.
(Note: The model can be rotated with the mouse)
We came up with a single-color illustration module system that both picked up on the garden theme in general and fully respected the Gardena branding with the aforementioned claim. The layout with the design-specific blocks and modules can be rearranged depending on the size of the specific packaging box – in other words, individually adapted without changing the basic look. The design modules are conceived in such a way that they always include all six sides of the box and thus convey the garden theme to the viewer from every perspective.
