My name is Jerry Foster. I’m an industrial designer who specializes in merchandising design and product development. Have a look around. If you need creative help on a project, I’d be delighted to hear from you.
Back in 2007, we were happy to provide display concepts for a popular spirits brand. Since the unit would be placed behind the bar (often referred to in the industry as a “back bar display”), we were free to incorporate lighting to make it more eye-catching. It was a colorful brand, so we decided to uplight the bottles on pedestals with LED lighting projected through the brand’s native Central American iconography.
For the concepts below, we explored a colorful structure of tubing and wire inspired by this brand’s typography featuring touches of acrylic and large graphic panels to tell the story. The first concept made it to production and was successfully rolled out nationwide.
How do you quickly visualize a range of approaches to merchandise baked goods in the deli section of a grocery store? Quick black and white sketches! But how do you insure they are accurate to scale? I build a very basic structure in 3D, render it in black and white, sketch on top of it with a Wacom tablet using Sketchbook Pro, and add logos and notes in Photoshop.
Everyone knows that holiday promotions are a great way to help brands boost sales. But how do you tie wine to Halloween? That was the challenge we were presented with regarding this popular brand. Armed with some very rough napkin doodles and a standard marketing brief, we were off and running. The results are below. What do you think?
Below is a great example of a brand that provides almost endless creative possibilities. Because it has a playful, bold and well-developed identity, working on it was almost like designing an attraction for a theme park. We explored a wide range of options for these wine displays, and we could have done a lot more. A couple of them were rolled out with great success at major retailers nationwide, and one of them even won a POPAI Gold Award that year.
Sometimes the ideas are a lot more important than a glossy photorealistic presentation. That was the case when I created these concepts for a client back in 2013. They wanted to attract attention by incorporating some theater into a mass display of their coffee liqueur. I made a rough 3D model in Cinema 4D of the product to scale and rendered an underlay in black and white (for me, faster than drawing it), then brought it into Autodesk Sketchbook on a Wacom tablet and did some color sketching on top of the line drawing. A few quick notations and the client got three clear options very quickly.
A brand can sometimes provide an almost literal inspiration for the physical structure of a display. That was the case for this wine display we created several years ago. Figuring out how to support the weight of the product in a fun and sculptural way can be a challenge, but it’s very rewarding when it finally comes together. Wine bottles are heavy, so it takes some creativity to present them to the consumer in a way that isn’t visually bulky.
Some time ago I had the chance to come up with some ideas for a display that would showcase a major grilling charcoal brand along with their associated condiment product line. They wanted the display to thematically stand out in-store and feature an interactive touchscreen unit for consumer information and recipes. After a round of quick sketches, they selected a design for rendering. What do you think?
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a one cooler that could expand or contract to suit small or large store environments? What if it could be daisy-chained electrically and rotated at any angle to make it easy to shop? And what if you could make ambient product shelves that could be interspersed with it for cross-merchandising? This is my attempt to address that goal. Locking rings would allow the modules to connect securely and funnel power between them. Non-powered modules would provide visually integrated shelf space for ambient product. A decorative cabinet base would provide overstock storage. What do you think?
