The company was founded in 1932 as Washington Poster Company and was always involved in the grocery industry.
It started out with hand painting and simple screen prints on window banners and card stock. In the 70's, the company became a screen print company, printing signage all sizes of advertising ephemera.
In the 80's, a salesperson and owner invented the "channel" or track system for modular reusable signage, which was especially good for produce departments, where prices can change once a day or more. One style of channel inserts was called "ChalkArt" and gained wide popularity in the 90's. Sales started to dwindle by the 2000's
When I took over the art department, I immediately started work on creating a branding system for the company and working with sales staff to create new lines of sign products.
Shown here, the company was going by two different names and had 3 different logos.
The logo was inspired by the typeface used on on the old letterhead, along with the channel the company was famous for, tying together the past and present. The green previously used in marketing materials was replaced with a warm blue.
This website looks pretty old school now, but it was the company's first website, and allowed customers to see the entire catalog of products and place small orders without the help of sales staff. It used part numbers for the first time and worked with the company's ERP system to track production and inventory. This helped streamline the process and save significantly on labor.
There was a trend in the industry away from the folksy chalk style and toward signage that contained photos with buying tips and nutritional information. WP's competitors' products were poorly designed and cheaply manufactured, so PhotoReal became the first new product line. All produce photographs were taken in-house for both the individual and category signs.
In addition to produce signage, we also created products for the meat department, category signage, and café menus, all with original photography.
Some of the new marketing materials included a promotional binder to sell printing services in addition to stock products. We created a new kind of sample box that was more user-friendly and more likely to stay on a buyer's office shelf. Catlogs with all the new products were printed once a year and sent to all customers. For a short time period, we sent out newsletters, before switching to html email newsletters. "Cultivating the Shopping Experience" was a collaboration with sales staff to discourage the spread of paper signage in supermarkets. We provided data about the higher cost of material and labor vs. the cost of our modular, reusable, more attractive systems. Sign kit character and Chef Blueberry illustration by Tim Goldman. Shopping cart man designed by Tyler Townley.
