How NOW Saved 10 Production Hours Per SKU

Decades ago, many believed health and wellness products were solely reserved for fitness fanatics, but as today’s consumer continues to strive towards better physical and mental health in an increasingly stressful world, holistic healthy lifestyles have become widely mainstream. According to the Global Wellness Institute, the global health and wellness industry grew 12.8% between 2015 and 2017 and represents 5.3% of the global economic output at $4.2 trillion dollars. With this type of rapid growth, it is easy to believe that the demand for “better for you” products will continue.

For example, Euromonitor International believes that the health and wellness food industry in particular is experiencing rapid growth ahead of regular packaged food due to changing consumer preferences, as many aim to adopt a better diet and are gravitating towards more natural and functional product offerings. And as for sports nutrition, Euromonitor states that the global market grew a whopping 190% from 2004 to 2018, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.9%.

While it may appear that consumers have only recently begun taking their health into their own hands within the last decade or so, NOW has always understood the importance of a sound mind and body – they started selling their wellness-oriented products in 1968.

NOW’s mission is to empower their customers to lead healthier lives and its product lines touch multiple sub-categories across the general health and wellness category – with supplements, sports nutrition, personal care, essential oils, pet supplements, and packaged food.

“NOW prides itself on being a comprehensive health and wellness solution for consumers. Unfortunately, there are some “bad players” in our industry that make false label claims, but we strive to be very transparent in our values. NOW meets and exceeds government regulations, and we go a step further by investing in third party certifications too. Quality control and label integrity is imperative to our business success and of course, packaging label and artwork plays a key role in marketing our product. It’s everything,” says Creative Services Manager, Tim Imbordino.

Accurate and high-quality products are clearly a top priority for many health and wellness organizations, especially NOW. However, it was particularly challenging for NOW’s creative team to render realistic label and product imagery for their website and marketing materials.

“NOW is a relatively large company but we are a small team; traditionally our process requires ordering the prototype, waiting on it to ship from our warehouse, and then shooting the product, editing and retouching, etc. – all of that took 10-12 hours minimum to produce three images (left, right, and center) for each SKU. And of course, time is money. With 1400+ SKUs and frequent label updates.”

Esko Studio is an Adobe Illustrator plug-in that helps designers produce life-like 3D renders of product packaging much faster than traditional methods. According to Tim, “There was very little learning curve when it came to using Esko Studio, since we’re all heavy-users of Illustrator. With Studio, our team can now create a 3D rendering (of the same three left, right, and center poses) for a SKU in less than an hour.”

Within Esko Studio, Tim’s team created pre-existing templates that anyone can use to “plug and chug” the appropriate label changes or create product imagery, thus further expediting the product shot process and making it scalable. “Esko has been a lifesaver. We can update our PDFs faster than ever before; it makes it even easier for us to update our website and corresponding marketing materials, too.”

The NOW creative team also faced another challenge: color consistency in their product images. In the past, they had varying shades of orange on their supplement labels, and there was varying accuracy in the proportions and sizing of the bottles. Starting with a single product model, designers add the actual production artwork for the different SKUs in Adobe Illustrator. By using the same lighting and view settings with the real artwork, they can quickly create consistent product shots across an entire product range.

Tim says, “We are still in the early stages of using Studio but we’re really excited about what we’ve been able to accomplish in such a short period of time. Once we establish a more developed process, we know everything will continue to improve. We are using the images in various print and digital marketing materials and the quality isn noticeably better.”

NOW continues to develop their processes to respond with agility to growing consumer preferences for health and wellness products. They are working towards the ability to produce and adapt pre-existing, high-quality product imagery to include new label ingredients and certification artwork for their marketing materials at a moment’s notice. The team at NOW believes that their partnership with Esko will help pave the way.

“Overall, the Esko team has been straightforward, helpful, and even gone above and beyond the expected to make sure we were quickly up-and-running with the software,” says Tim. “We are so impressed that the Esko team is very open to feedback on software improvements; it shows how forward-thinking the business is and how it strives to continually provide customers a seamless user experience.”