Over the last 2 years, Sprout Viz had the privilege of working with Staples to bring their various sub-brands to life. In addition to work solutions for the office with Tru Red, we visualized solutions for the breakroom with Perk, custodial supplies with Coastwide, furniture stores with Union & Scale, and consumer electronics with NXT. These solutions helped boost engagement online through the use of detailed product shots and on-packaging graphics. Aligning CGI and print-ready files expedited the packaging production process and unified the online and shelf-edge presentation.
Staples’ experience in office supplies brings with it an expectation to meet variety of needs for a myriad of customers. While this includes portraying work-from-home spaces, we were also engaged to help visualize a new Staples co-work offering. Our parent company, Sprout Studios, took a design-first approach to the problem—visualizing the overall experience for large office environments, later moving on to product design and manufacturing for key components. Sprout Viz then stepped in to create photorealistic renderings of the environment for marketing, packaging, and online sales. We worked from existing 3D CAD files where possible, and created CAD files from scratch for others where there was no time to wait for an off-tool product to photograph.
In an ideal world, packages would be produced and products manufactured simultaneously. Unfortunately, we know that this often isn’t the case for companies who frequently have to operate under tight and changing deadlines. We applied our understanding of structural packaging design and on-package graphic design to bring photorealistic package images across all of the Staples' sub-brands to hit these tight timelines.
With over 16,000 SKUs in its portfolio, Staples presented the widest spectrum of items we had ever seen from a single client. From a 30,000 sq ft office filled with Staples sub-branded products to a pair of Tru Red scissors in 25 different colorways, we visualized thousands of products. Our familiarity with their products and our toolbox of digital imaging solutions prepared us to visualize both upcoming and in-market products without slowing the process to request and troubleshoot CAD files. The CGI image library, where a single 3D CAD asset can be reused over and over—to change colors, materials, and finishes; or to modify configurations for environments, static images, videos, VR, and interactive demos—has become a time- and money-saving investment.
Daniel Reilly
