Alliance Boots, the pharmacy, health and beauty retailer and distributor, owns Britain’s biggest pharmacy chain with 2,500 of the 12,600 pharmacies in the UK.
Alliance Boots was formed in July 2006 by the merger of Alliance Unichem and the Boots Group (subsequently acquired in an £11 billion private equity-led takeover by AB acquisitions). As well as creating the largest pharmacy chain in the UK, the merger has bought together a number of international businesses. As part of extending the Boots brand into new markets, a trial is taking place in Norway to convert a number of existing pharmacies, currently trading as Alliance Apotek, to Boots stores. In addition to a change to the store environment many of the Boots brands, well known to the UK consumer, including No7 and Botanics are being introduced.
Design Cognition were approached to develop Norwegian specific packaging for these trial stores. Over the past few months 500 artworks have been developed for over 700 SKUs for the Boots brands including Botanics, Soltan and Expert.
Design Cognition provided the packaging technical recourses to develop the packs and also the project management, ensuring close working relationships for artwork generation, printing, pack embellishment, marketing and Norwegian translators and making sure that agreed deadlines were met throughout the process.
By appointing Design Cognition to carry out this outsourced packaging development costs were kept to a minimum for Alliance Boots during the crucial test market phase and also allowed their internal resource to remain focused on existing core projects.
Design Cognition provides an outsourced packaging development department to companies of all sizes: advising and project managing all aspects of pack design & development, both graphic & structural. They have wide experience of all types of materials & components. This coupled with their extensive knowledge of all packaging principles and processes means that they design pack components that can be manufactured cost effectively.
Managing Director Chris Penfold said:
“In today’s marketplace companies are under increasing pressure to keep costs and overheads down. We are working with a number of large multinational companies to help them meet their ever stretching targets with their ever decreasing in-house staff resource levels. The key for us is to continue to offer a flexible, responsive resource to meet our clients’ needs cost effectively.”
For further information go to www.designcognition.com
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