Case study : Elephant Design Private Limited - International experience with consultative approach

A team of graduates from NID, Ahmedabad established Elephant Design Private Limited (EDPL) in 1989 in Pune to provide trans-disciplinary design/brand consultancy services to the industry.

Today, Elephant is one of the largest design companies in India with strength of over 60 professionals, and with projects impacting India and eighty other developing markets across multiple domains and disciplines. The company acts in the areas of branding, product design, packaging, print & other media and multi-sensorial, experiential retail or signage. Some of its significant clients are Bajaj Auto Ltd, Hindustan Unilever, P & G, Britannia, Titan and Club Mahindra: Zest. It has international presence through strategic partnership with Continuum, USA and npk Design, The Netherlands. The company is also the Indian associate of The Design Alliance 

Case Study

Titan decided to venture into prescription eye-wear business. As with its other brands, the company decided the new business will also need to be a leader in its category and will provide customers a unique and world-class experience of purchasing eye wear.

Objective

In order to provide a unique world-class experience, Titan invited Elephant Strategy + Design to design the store experience and identity. Collective idea of the stores that emerged was to provide customers an international quality experience along with easy accessibility and a consultative approach. The stores also had to include Optometry and Contact Lens Clinics.

Solution provided

Team Elephant obtained useful insights into the competition and current retail experience.  The team was challenged to reinforce  trust of TATA brand, style of TITAN brand and at the same time make the shopping experience comfortable.

Team Elephant divided the project into three categories:

• Branding Solutions - which included design of Brand Identity, Communication Material and Signage
• Experience Design including in-store design  with the elements of trust, comfort and style
• Visual Guidelines

Elephant introduced user-friendly technology interface to help one come to a satisfactory decision about frame design.  A monitor with web-cam was introduced at the retail point where one would be able to tray several frames and get his/her pictures stored. The monitor would play back all those pictures for comparison and one would be able to actually take a very informed decision on frame design

Benefits

As of December 2009, the company has successfully opened 70 stores in 39 cities of India. Enthusiastic with the response, the company is planning to open another 200 stores in coming two and a half years.

“Our partnership with Elephant Design was extremely fruitful.  We were quite impressed with their approach to understanding client’s brief leading to the concept and creative design development – and finally flawless execution.”

S Ravi Kant, COO, Eyewear Business, Titan

“I believe we will see more experiential & more niche retail formats in the coming year.”

Ashwini Deshpande, Director, Elephant Strategy + Design