THE ROLE OF PRODUCTION IN BRAND GUARDIANSHIP
Part of the Equator team for 10 years, Rod joined the US team early in its history after he relocated back to the Midwest from San Francisco, where he was a partner of a small design studio. Here, he tells us what makes the Equator production team unique and what drives them toward better performance and delivery for Equator and its clients…
Part of a Total Solution:
Defining quality
Production departments are the technical side of the packaging design industry and are heavily invested in delivering a successful outcome by working collaboratively with creatives to deliver a designer’s vision to shelf. The production department is diverse in its skill sets. Our team comprises color management, retouch, adaptation, production, repro art professionals and quality control specialists.
Many brands have seen design that ends up being compromised by production. That’s why Equator is different. Our approach is a total solution under one roof, where production and design communicate through all phases of the project. This approach gives us tremendous advantages, because what we show the client as design can be carried to the final outcome with zero compromise. That means there are no unexpected surprises for the client.
Equator Production:
Technical Acumen
Production thrives on detail. We are technical, precise, ordered and versed in FDA regulatory requirements – that’s the type of people we are. We are the doers who take the design vision and ensure all final deliverables are produced consistently, correctly and on time.
At Equator, we want to provide an extra level of oversight on the unique problems that face private-brand food distributors. Helping brand managers deal with color across the large ranges of packaging types that food products require. Our clients often see their brands spread out across multiple suppliers, print methods and substrates, making guardianship of color difficult for them to manage alone.
Having a single source who knows the design intent and can harness their on-site expertise, helps ensure color consistency on multiple substrates that are used across all print types. By communicating directly with printers to obtain their press profile and their print specifications, Equator can partner as a guardian to our client base and their brands.
Delivering for Clients
Solutions that work
Meeting our clients’ expectations is what makes the changing technological landscape vital to our industry. While technological advances and market shifts are always changing, one thing that doesn’t change is the client’s need for more value at a quicker pace for less cost.
As we grow and add more Equator sites in the US and abroad, we always look for how can we leverage the simple tasks without losing focused attention to detail. How can we work as a global production team to efficiently fill the peaks and valleys of any normal production department?
How can production further aid the design department so that design time is focused in the right creative direction? We are always looking to technology to develop tools like LivePrint to aid our clients’ production and print quality management needs.
At Equator, we don’t only critique our design at every stage, we also assess the ability of our overall process to deliver that creative to our clients. We innovate – not just around the design, but across the entire process from start to finish. That drive to deliver for our clients hasn’t changed in the past 10 years since joining, but the way we go about it has been developed and crafted very carefully over that time.
If you’d like to find out more about our role as brand custodians and the importance of effective production management in delivering signed-off designs to shelf, then get in touch. We’d be thrilled to show you around any of our studios to drive home the benefits and uniqueness of our under-one-roof solution.
