Masterbuilt Smoking Experience Display

One of my unique talents that I have developed over time as a designer, is the ability to think and produce products as a packaging engineer. This has developed over years of working in manufacturing and packaging, working side by side with engineers and production facilities alike.

In 2015 Sam’s Club was excited with the prospects of having a smoker starter kit on the retail floor in support of the Masterbuilt Smokers that were already being sold in clubs. The challenge was to develop a store ready product based on hypothetical scales, vendor display requirements, shipping container quantities, purchase order fulfillment, costing materials and of course developing the product.

This is one of those instances however when I design something and never actually get to see the finished product, as it goes from production straight to the store. The process begins when the customer decides what it wants to sell in a kit, and then I have to develop a layout for floor displays based on the vendors requirements, which consists of a pallet skirt; which wraps several pallets that acts as a base for a display. This pallet skirt ships on a pallet with master cartons that have PDQ displays that hold the product which is packed in full color litho cartons.

The challenge, to develop the cartons backward based on pallet dimensions, contents of the carton and number of cartons per PDQ display. Once I have mathematically arrived at a carton containing the product, the product packed in PDQ’s and the PDQ’s contained within a master carton, I mock these up in miniature to scale. This includes modelling and fabricating pallets and creating a diplay established by vendor guidelines.

Once the customer approves the design, I create the full-size scale cartons which contains the product, PDQs and pallet skirt, which then go to the factory for manufacturing. Our marketing director has time and time again marveled at how a graphic designer/ right brain creative person is able to mathematically create all of these items. But believe you me, this is a skill that has been honed over decades of practical experience. Yet, I still do get a kick out of hearing it.

The artwork is all edited within Photoshop, and the layout is completed in illustrator for production.