Get the cooler out of the way of the product.
The Facelift
- Industrial Design Lead
- Every platform
- Retail measurement
What a facelift is here.
Not a restyle. It was a redesign of what a commercial cooler ought to be, in order to sell more. It started from a large body of research the marketing team had accumulated over years. I analysed that research and organised new rounds of research to verify and develop the proposal.
The changes are small in isolation and they are the same change repeated: a black, flat, simple louver; flat glass doors with the heavy frames removed; LEDs inside the cabinet, on the product rather than the box; and a metalized chamfer along the edges that leads the eye inward, toward the goods.
Every one of those decisions removes the cooler from between the shopper and the thing for sale. A grille that draws attention competes with the drink behind it. A door frame is a bar across the merchandise. An unlit interior reads as a dark cupboard. The chamfer is the only addition, and it earns its place by pointing.
How the cooler was measured.
- The number
This is the part that separates it from everything else on this site. A cooler does not report its own sales, so in this project we evaluated sales through the store owners' data: a set of test stores, the old equipment swapped out for the new, and measurement over six months.
It is a before-and-after in the same locations. It is not a randomised trial and should not be called one.
The number.
Twenty-five percent more contained product sold out of the new equipment than out of the old.
Contained product, not coolers: the drinks and food inside them. A bottler does not buy a cabinet because it is handsome. They buy it because more stock moves out of it, and every peso of the purchase is justified against that.
The measurement window was six months. The design language was later extended to the rest of the Imbera line, including Pentágono.
- 01When there are no analytics, find the data the people selling the product already keep.
- 02Measure the product your object helps sell, not only the object itself.
- 03Remove every visual cue that competes with the merchandise unless it earns attention back.
Imbera Cooling, FEMSA
