Developed a creative direction for Kiehl's India’s major Deepavali campaign, crafting cohesive online and offline visual merchandising to enhance brand presence and celebrate the festive spirit.
Role
Industry
Duration
Stage 1. Brief, Challenges and Research
Kiehl's India approached my company Red Dino Sdn. Bhd. on 2023, asking us to provide creative direction for their upcoming Diwali Holiday Campaign. At the end of this project, we need to deliver Digital Assets and Physical Merchandise Assets and these assets will become the main creative placeholders used by the regions internal marketing team.
Although we Malaysians quite familiar with Diwali Celebration, we still have challenges as the culture in India are different than the cultures we are having here in Malaysia. Moreover, different regions in India have a different ways and phases on how they celebrating Diwali. This is a true challenge for my team as we need to do a thorough research for this campaign.
Stage 2. Concepts, Feedbacks and Focusing on One Culture
For Starters, we provide them with 3 concepts. The concepts play around with multiple themes of the celebrations, different aspects of the religion, popular and trending design techniques. We then continue to have 3-4 more iterations from the concepts that they think have potential to explore and even try a few more concepts.
We keep this process going for a few times until their team finally decide to focus on one popular culture in India: 'Horn OK Please'. This is the culture where popularized by lorry and truck drivers in India. They loved to add decorative pattern, ornaments, custom paints, adding multi-color lights and customize their horn sound. Then, when they seeing other truckers or lorry drivers, they communicate through their loud unique horn. This culture have been going for so long and have been commonly used throughout their country.
With this concept finally reached team agreement, our team next mission was to refined the concept visual.
Stage 3.A. Refining the Visual Concept
Finally, a concept have been chosen. We did a few iterations - adding more elements, getting rid a few more elements, refine each elements, play around with the color palettes, and clean up until both parties are satisfied.
Stage 3.B. Visual Breakdown and Deliverables
Its final and all loved the design. Now, we need to do most detailed works which is breakdown, extract all the elements, group them, give each elements and layers a name and make 1-2 variations to fit a certain situation or application. This process to ensure the team from across the world that use our assets can use them with ease.
Stage 3.C. Development of Digital Assets
Categorization: Referring their previous Campaign Guidelines, we take note on what assets they need; Web Banners (desktop and mobile), Email Marketing, and Social Media Banners. We also create a simple animation of the visual adcept and turn it into GIF format. Motion is one of important assets nowadays to marketize your products.
Guidelines and Mockups: Once all the designs were completed, we create a simple mockup and compiled them in one file stating the dimension of each designs, explaining the purpose, how to use along with the what variations they can do.
Delivering Assets: Before delivering, we ensure all the digital assets were name correctly, placed in the right folders, compile the related folders and put under one main folder with all the important working files and other minor assets like fonts, color codes and most importantly attached with the guideline we did earlier.
Stage 4.A. Merchandise Assets Preparation
Now we have done and deliver Digital Assets, we still have to apply the visual concept to their physical merchandise.
Stage 4.B. Merchandise Design Strategy
Each merchandise items have their marketing purposes. Some are pretty direct, copy and paste works. But, some items need us to consult Kiehl's team and ask their advise, feedback and create or tweak more visuals variations focusing on the merchandise items.
Stage 4.C. Print-Ready and Mockups
Printing File Assets: Most important things we need to do was to get the right templates and measurements for their printing need. Once we received them, we get right into adapting all the key visuals, patterns to the templates.
Mockup and Guidelines: The designs now all print ready but need to let India Markets know how to use them appropriately. So, now we need to mocking up each designs. We also needed to create some 3D items from scratch for certain application like the round table and apothecary table. When we done mocking up, now its my main job to create a guideline deck for India internal team to refer and use.
Delivering Assets: We have a looottt of assets, printing assets, mockups, guidelines deck, working files, jpegs and other assets like fonts and design elements. And due to time constraint, our team have a hard time to get all files organized. So its up to me to get all naming properly and organized in their proper folders. We then upload all to our cloud server to be shared with the client.
Final Say,
Fuhhh~ super challenging project and we keep being chased. At one point, my team and I all fallen sick at the same time and I still need to cater to the client to affirm them that we will ensure the project get done in time. But, this project spark my passion in creative industry again and if given the chance I hope to experience this kind of project again but with more proper form and visionary thinking.
