An entirely new product for the audio market, the BoomStick from start-up company BoomCloud 360 is a small device that connects to any pair of headphones to provide a richer overall sound and a sense of immersion.
Says BoomCloud 360 CTO Alan Kraemer, “Traditional audio engineering ends with speakers and headphones. What most people don’t understand is that our brain is part of the system. With the BoomStick, we unlocked the power of the ear/brain system in order to present music and cinema content in an entirely new and much more emotionally impactful way.”
In bringing the product to retail, BoomCloud 360 had several obstacles to overcome with its packaging. First, how to educate consumers on this innovative new product in the limited space provided by a carton measuring just 6¾ in. tall by 4 in. wide by ¾ in. deep. Next, how to convey the value proposition of the premium product, priced at $99. And finally, how to adequately express the vivid and vibrant audio experience delivered by the technology.
For brand design firm MiresBall, the goal first and foremost was to design packaging that “grabbed your eyeballs,” says company Creative Director John Ball. “The headphone category at retail is dominated by lots of black, and then secondarily, lots of white. We said, ‘We can’t do either one of those. We have to do something different.’
“The idea of a color-saturated design came from a conversation we had early on with some of BoomCloud 360’s management where they were describing the BoomStick and they said, ‘It’s like going from black-and-white TV to color TV—that moment in The Wizard of Oz where everything becomes color.”
So too does the BoomStick carton burst forth from the shelves of black-and-white audio packaging. The entire carton is decorated with the full color spectrum, emanating from a rendering of the BoomStick device in the middle of the front panel—a symbol of the vibrant transformation that takes place in sound with the BoomStick.
At the bottom of the carton’s front panel, three simple, step-by-step icons with copy—“Plug it in,” “Push the button,” and “Hear the difference”—communicate the purpose of the product and its simplicity. Explains Ball, “The storytelling really needed to communicate what the product would do, because otherwise the consumer wouldn’t know by looking at it. It was really an exercise in simplicity and boiling down the message to the bare essentials.”
Because the BoomStick is just the first in a line of audio products being developed by BoomCloud 360, MiresBall designed a logo that can easily be paired with new product names. To reinforce the idea that the company takes audio and makes it bigger and stronger, MiresBall chose an uppercase font with a super-bold weight for the “Boom” in BoomStick. “Stick” uses a lighter-weight font for contrast, as will all future product names.
On the back of the carton, a white background with copy, diagrams, and images lets BoomCloud 360 finish telling the story of the product—but still in a simple, easy-to-understand way.
To emphasize the premium nature of the product, the carton is constructed of a heavy-weight paperboard sleeve with a black box inside decorated with a blind-embossed logo. Says Ball, “There’s a little bit of a reveal to it.” The sleeve is offset-printed in four process colors plus a satin coating.
Says Ball of the project, “It’s very gratifying for us to be able to make this kind of impact. Because they were a start-up, we were basically starting from a blank sheet of paper, and we had a big challenge ahead of us in terms of getting visibility and telling the story. It really gave us a great opportunity to help them make an impact.”
