CDW Merchants
When your company offers everything from mannequin shoes to gift packaging to glitter spheres, how do you highlight your product offerings? CDW Merchants turned to BatesMeron to find the answer.
As a top visual merchandising and e-commerce packaging company, CDW Merchants is responsible for sourcing the hard-to-find, customized display elements for companies such as Club Monaco, Kate Spade and Janie & Jack, as well as the creative packaging for Amazon.com and Birchbox. Because of this diverse breadth of products, they found they were getting stuck—recurring clients would pigeonhole them into one specialty, while prospective clients didn’t fully grasp the full extent to which CDW Merchants could be a resource.
To solve this problem, CDW Merchants came to us to develop a modular, three-dimensional marketing tool to educate their clients about their broad portfolio of sourced and customized materials. We also wanted this tool to be interactive, and because CDWM’s promise is to bring your vision to life, the creative sky was the limit.
After an initial meeting with Josh Wesolowski, associate creative director at CDW Merchants, our team went straight to the drawing board—or in our case, the Pinterest board. We examined new and exciting ways to showcase information that you could see and hold in your hand. We were inspired by everything from molecular gastronomy to handcrafted soaps before eventually landing on three, out-of-this-world concepts.
“We were looking for a sales tool that would feature tangible case studies to start a conversation with our new and current customers,” Wesolowski said. “We could have done this in-house, but turned to BatesMeron for their highly creative approach to help develop new ideas.”
The first concept gave “An Inside Look” at CDW Merchants’ products and projects. Influenced by their expertise in fashion, we concepted an interactive storefront window box through which customers can discover all that CDWM offers. There are slots for varying case study-swatch hybrids, which allow for mix-and-match capability as CDWM representatives select which textiles they’d like to introduce to a client.
Concept two featured playable textile records with an album “jacket” touting the case study, while the third concept suspended pieces of CDWM-elements in acrylic cubes, challenging the viewer to see the materials behind glass as one would view a store window display.
[inspiration mood board]
[inspiration mood board]
“It was really fun to get a new perspective from BatesMeron,” Wesolowski says. “They complemented our creative process well.”
Upon selection of An Inside Look, CDW Merchants pulled through the concepts using their special resources and production facilities. We were thrilled to receive the winning concept in the mail—An Inside Look is already being used as a sales tool and their team couldn’t be happier.
