Coca Cola Beverage Aisle Reinvention
2015-2018 — Creative Direction, Industrial Design & Engineering
Coca Cola was looking to re-engage grocery store customers whose changing lifestyles and shopping behaviours had them avoiding the beverage aisle. Customer behaviour had shifted to shopping the perimeter of the store—focusing on quick trips and healthier choices—with many customers identifying they actively avoid the centre aisles. Coca Cola was looking to create a destination for beverages in grocery that would reinvent customer perception of their product and remind them of how Coca Cola’s products fit the lifestyle of modern consumers.
Our team partnered with Coca Cola’s internal design agency to develop a series of beverage category retail concepts to help define the shopping experience for beverages in grocery. We guided the vision for the Beverage Aisle and the development of the initial prototype, developing new experience-driven concepts and leading our team in refining, engineering and prototyping multiple in-store execution.
Our first prototype was led by Coca Cola’s in-house team’s insights which we quickly refined into a prototype design for preliminary in-store testing. Working on a tight timeline, I used quick sketches to communicate our design intent for engineering to the Coca Cola in-house design team—to ensure our visions matched — then led the engineering team that developed the prototype execution.
We then worked with the Coca Cola team to improve and refine the beverage aisle prototype into an elegant solution that was ready to roll out for real-world execution. In addition to a new polished look, our revised system was designed to overlay on top of the in-store gondola significantly reducing the weight, size to ship and difficulty to install—reducing the time to set up in half.
Leveraging our experience from the US, we partnered with Coca Cola Canada to build a fully re-thought beverage aisle that would help connect customers to the occasions where they most enjoyed Coca Cola. We built a digital end cap to remind customers of the joy of Coca Cola and—with the help of in-aisle visuals—tell this story and remind customers how Coca Cola could add fun to any occasion. This iteration of the beverage aisle was awarded a coveted Coca Cola research and development grant to study the in-store results of this critical initiative.
