Online supermarket Picnic (owned by German EDEKA) opens these days in Paris, goes to Hamburg later in April and the app is also available for residents of Berlin at the beginning of May. But first there was the official presentation of the own private label on Wednesday. About 2,000 products now bear the red and white logo.
Affordable product, ugly design
This story begins in late 2019. Tettje Halbertsma works as an analyst at Picnic and thinks it is time for a private label. After all, Albert Hein, Jumbo and Lidl also have them and do good business with them. At Joris Beckers and Michiel Muller she finds a pair of willing ears. The co-founders already have ideas for a private label, but they are not yet very concrete.
Halbertsma is allowed to put together a team and investigates. That starts with simple fieldwork. Going to other supermarkets, comparing private labels and seeing how the customer is presented with those products. 'What we quickly noticed was the design of private labels. Just about everything that needs to be affordable is ugly designed. It almost feels like a punishment for people who live on budget.'
Reinventing packaging
The team saw something else striking about the private labels of grocery retailers: 'Many products are similar, shampoo looks just like milk. We quickly agreed that this had to change: affordable products in beautiful packaging. Why do private labels have to have such a cheap look?'
But the biggest eye-opener is yet to come. Picnic does not have physical stores, the company does it with an app. All the private labels that the team encounters have been developed for the store shelf. "Once we realized that, a world opened up for us. This was an opportunity for us to design packaging from scratch. Design for home, not for the shelf', says Halbertsma.
Muller adds: 'The first design agencies we invited to our office came up with similar designs, in which all products looked alike. But we didn't want that. In the end, we ended up with an English design agency: Big Fish. They have a lot of experience with challengers like Picnic.'
Universal packaging
And then the next challenge. Can you design packaging that is suitable for various markets? In several languages, so that the same jar of chocolate spread can be sold in the Netherlands, France and Germany. You probably don't think about it on a daily basis, but the laws and regulations for labels are strict. And, which made it extra difficult for Picnic, not EU-wide.
'We are an internationally oriented company. That's why we immediately wanted to make it an international brand. That sounds simple, but such an objective has major consequences. For example, there are four languages on the packaging, including on small jars of sandwich fillings', says Halbertsma.
Who immediately adds that this turned out to be a headache. 'In one country you have to write everything out, for another country percentages are sufficient. Even the use of punctuation marks is close. We have enlisted the help of an external party who knows exactly what the legal rules are like.'
A waving whale
After three years of coming up with ideas, drawing, collecting feedback, redesigning and revalidating them, Picnic's own private label brand has now been officially launched. And what do you get?
On the pack of sprinkles it rains... sprinkles. The drawn lady catches them with an upside-down umbrella. Picnic wines have a QR code. Just scan with your phone and you'll go to a Spotify playlist. And on the bag of cat gravel we see a cat reading the newspaper.
And so there are numerous examples that show that the design process did not happen overnight. 'We even use animated images in the app. On the pack of rice cakes, the whale waves its tail. We do the same with the rabbit ears on the pack of toilet paper,' says Muller.
If your design for home and not for the shelf, should there still be a name on the front on every package? After all, the company mainly communicates product information via the app. Anyone who sees Picnic's own energy drink knows the answer to that question.
Search history determines offered offer
Picnic now serves hundreds of thousands of households in three different countries. According to Muller, all those users are now not suddenly presented with only private label products. 'We are not going to hide Unox, Campina and Heineken. If people mainly search for well-known brands, they can be seen first in the app.'
'Some A-brands are difficult to copy. But if customers gradually find out that our own green tea is quite tasty, more people will automatically choose that private label.'
Toilet rolls packed differently
Sustainability, we haven't talked about that yet. In addition to reducing plastic, this issue for Picnic coincides with the available space. The better the products fit in their own crates, the fewer transport movements there are.
'We put more grams of chips in the same bag and have given the toilet roll packaging a different shape. As a result, it fits much better in the crate. This saves us space', says Muller.
