Design Consultancy
Thirdperson
Steve Smith
020 7490 8056
stevesmith@thirdperson.co.uk
www.thirdperson.co.uk
The Challenge
Nusa Kitchen, a small but popular eatery in Clerkenwell, London, sells fresh organic take-away soup as well as sandwiches, salad boxes, snacks and drinks which draw on the owners’ South East Asian heritage. The company’s previous identity, Soupacific, had indicated a specialism in soup, but since changing its name Nusa Kitchen was concerned that customers were lacking awareness of the fresh soup offer. A lull in sales during the summer and autumn of 2006 seemed to confirm this. Nusa Kitchen needed to remarket its core product to stimulate customer awareness and sales.
The Brief
Thirdperson was commissioned to devise a point of sale campaign that could run from December to the end of February 2007, on a budget of £6,270 (Euro 9,207). The marketing promotion would need to be cost effective to produce, to have a positive impact on the small shop environment and to enable Nusa staff to engage with customers at point of sale.
The Design An idea for a copy line that referred to ‘chunky knit soups’ soon led Thirdperson to suggest the launch of the ‘Winter Collection’: a range of special winter soups with a high impact carton design to promote the new recipes. Nusa already had a stock of soup cartons, so the idea of ‘wrapping up for winter’ was translated into a heat-resistant cardboard sleeve that fitted snugly over Nusa’s existing waxed cartons. Each sleeve was printed with photography of one of four knitwear patterns, bearing a simple embroidered label ‘handmade by Nusa’.
The Results During the twelve week campaign the Winter Collection design contributed to a year-on-year increase of 24.88% in units of soup sold and an overall increase in 26.32% in revenue from soup sales, compared to an expected 15% growth in sales during the winter months. Only two or three soups a day out of eight recipes featured in the Winter Collection, but in the first three weeks of December these soups comprised 56.29% of Nusa’s soup sales. Customers started requesting particular sleeve designs to complete their collections, and some even used the special cartons as desk tidies. Throughout the twelve-week campaign the Winter Collection soups made up 50.97% of Nusa’s soup sales.
