Quality, Creativity, & Value: Telling the Taylor Box Story
Strategy & Optimization / Design & User Experience / Flexible Content / WordPress
Making Introductions
The Taylor Box Company in Warren, Rhode Island, creates some of the most memorable paperboard packaging solutions for the country’s top brands — Sony, Nike, HBO, Kind, Gillette, Bulgari, and more.
They are a family company with an emphasis on people, process, and quality. They forge lasting relationships with their employees, partners, and suppliers. An initial tour of their facility impressed upon us the high level of personal skill mixed with technology that is required to manufacture these creative solutions.
Personal connections are key to their business, but they might only help sustain incoming projects, not grow them. The website is a platform for Taylor Box to showcase their craftsmanship and process on a national stage, and one of the goals was to create a site that would entice creative agencies and brand marketing boutiques to take notice.
Our engagement with Taylor Box started with a stand-alone Discovery project that dived deep into existing data, initiated new research, and explored the big ideas behind their short- and long-term business objectives. This opportunity to really understand them, their language, and their goals contributed greatly to a successful design and build engagement.
Facilitating the initial “Handshake”
An idea from the beginning centered around being personal — how can the website mimic the initial greeting and handshake that you might get if you met someone from Taylor Box in person?
The essence was simple:
- A friendly introduction: Nice to meet you, we are Taylor Box.
- An example of our people and what we do: a video
- The friends we might have in common: logos of brands we have worked with
- A question directed at you, our new friend: What can we do for you?
- Examples: Work we have done for other people that might be relevant to your needs
This story framework helped define the Taylor Box voice and also helped their team focus on their sales process from a customer’s point of view. What are the kinds of things that a new client needs to know? What kinds of clients and projects do you usually take on? Does my project fit in with your specialty and focus? The three answers for “What can we do for you?” are very carefully chosen to reflect the kind of role that Taylor Box wants to play — a design collaborator, a production partner, or a packaging designer.
One Visual Language for Multiple Audiences
A key debate occurred during Discovery around designing the new site for existing customers versus designing for the new customers that they want to attract. The assumption was that to design for the latter, the site might turn away the former. We did not believe that a site needs to be one thing to one group, and we recommended that we strive for a new audience without leaving the existing ones behind.
They need to be a knowledgeable insider to production partners, a provocative collaborator to creative agencies, and an experienced and trusted partner to large national brands.
The content, organization, pacing, and visual support had to address both old and new audiences. The design flourishes could attract a new audience simply by underscoring Taylor Box’s creativity and confidence. We chose to move forward with a very light and spacious design that borrows typographical ideas from high-end fashion magazines. The approachability and authentic nature of the content made the design more human and less exclusive, while still communicating the high quality of the craftsmanship.
Encouraging a Deep Dive
Once the initial introduction is made, one should go deeper into the portfolio and the expertise of Taylor Box. The Projects section is made of quick project overviews mixed with more in-depth Case Studies of complicated designs or innovative builds. Taxonomy filters for Industry help explain what kinds of projects rigid paperboard can be used for, and which industries Taylor Box is comfortable working within.
The “Box Style” taxonomy filter is aimed at power users who understand the architecture of box construction. Behind that taxonomy are white box wireframes of standard and highly custom constructions. These aim to educate the visitor about some of the terms they might hear should they give Taylor Box a call about their particular project.
Taylor Box’s blog is another section of the site that one can become lost within — in a good way. Quality content encourages browsing to find design inspiration, go behind the scenes with manufacturing articles, learn about sustainability, and get event announcements to meet and greet Taylor Box folks, as well as company news.
Unboxing Taylor Box
It was a joy to work with a team of creative craftspeople like Taylor Box. They are people who care deeply about delivering great work that delivers a “Wow!” moment. Right after the site launched, we were so happy to hear that the entire team was “pumped” for the new design and organization. The owner, Dan Shedd, kept getting pulled aside by employees telling him how great it was. We are beyond proud to have been given the opportunity to wow the wowers.