With the help of Elmwood, a confusing range of products was dramatically streamlined, repositioned, rebranded, repackaged and a powerful sales presentation created. Sales increased by 35% and Challs is now listed in most of the UK’s major supermarkets and is in negotiations to take the brand to Europe.
Getting a product into supermarkets means winning over the supermarket’s buyers, who decide what goes on the shelves. And with buyers constantly under pressure to trim the number of brands on display, the battle to keep shelf presence is relentless.
It was a battle that Challs International – a small manufacturer of cleaning products – was losing. ‘We were a minnow trying to swim with the sharks. We were always vulnerable because we're up against big brands,’ says managing director Graham Burchell. ‘We’d been in business for a number of years and were moderately successful, our problem was that we were competing with big, multi-national brands with huge advertising and marketing spend.’
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Challs and the business context.
Read the video transcript
The business needed to do something about that vulnerability. So in 2001, Burchell and his management team took part in Designing Demand Immerse, the strategic design advice service which is part of the Design Council’s Designing Demand programme. A group of design experts visited the company for a day’s workshop in order to identify areas where the company could use design strategically.
And for a small team necessarily preoccupied with day-to-day management rather than long-term strategic thinking, the opportunity to share problems with outsiders was welcome.
A change of strategy
Burchell recalls: ‘We expected to be given some lovely designs, but that's not what we got.’ Instead, Challs was given a detailed analysis of its strategy.
‘A product and brand mapping exercise showed that the product portfolio wasn’t well structured and the on shelf presence wasn’t as coherent as that of the competition. And Challs was also spending time on products that weren’t making much money,’ says Design Associate Evan Kitsell.
With help from the design experts, Challs decided to focus on its strongest product area – plughole and drain care and its strongest brand, Buster.
‘We put Buster, our crown jewels if you like, on the table, and we committed £40,000 - a year's profits to a design project. Now to a big company that doesn’t sound like very much money, but to us that was essentially a year’s profit. It was a bold move but we were prepared to take an educated risk,’ says Burchell.
