Introduction
During my internship at senz° umbrellas, I was asked to develop an object that shop owners could place outside, indicating that they were selling senz° umbrellas in their shop. We called it an outdoor ‘point-of-sale’ tool.
The result is this intentionally blown-over commercial sign, stating ‘Are you stormproof yet?’. It doubles as a display for a senz° traditional storm umbrella.
The process
This was the first time I was in charge of my own design challenge in the context of a company. And I liked it!
I started out by heading to the city, observing POS-tools currently on the market. Also, there are a lot of rules for placing a sign like this on the street.
Then I started analysing from a customer-perspective what kind of experience people have with a senz° umbrella. It’s about feeling the quality, the durability, and most importantly: a sense of being protected to bad weather.
Concept design
The goal? Communicating the values mentioned above by means of a point-of-sale product. After an ideation phase, I came up with the following concepts.
Prototype
Quickly after presenting these concepts to the management, I was given the budget to build a prototype of the blown-over commercial sign.
I went to get some wood, screws and a lot of white spray-paint. A week and a half later I was ready to test the ‘blown over’ POS-tool with key-account retailers.
The results
I’ve spent the final days of my internship at senz° editing this video. It covers the results of three cold days of street testing with my outdoor point of sale tool prototype.
The results were amazing. More than half of the people walking by the blown over sign noticed it. (opposed to 10% of the people when using a traditional commercial sign). On top of that, 11 out of 20 pedestrians memorized the brand name ‘senz°’ when I asked them ‘What product did you see advertised 50 meters earlier.’ (opposed to 0 out of 20 people when using a traditional commercial sign)