As part of a project to develop a handbook for HP’s Ericsson account team, we’ve just art directed a shoot in snow-covered Stockholm working with local photographer Ryno Quantz. It was a rare opportunity to capture the entire HP management team in one place as they’d been drawn to Sweden from places as far afield as Malaysia and Brazil. Their event was predominantly focused on the working relationship between Ericsson and HP, as their outsourced IT services provider and, during the session we witnessed, emphasised the importance of getting together and working together. Coincidentally, the shoot provided us with a great opportunity to follow the same advice with some of the very nice HP people we work with from a design and marketing perspective. We therefore enjoyed their company with some excellent Swedish cuisine – not a meatball in sight – a glass or two of ‘Mariestad’ beer, which was very nice, and a shot of ‘Skåne’ the local Schnapps which tasted like a cross between Vodka and rocket fuel and
was less nice, but ‘when in Rome…’ or Stockholm.
Category: bd2 projects
Bunzl are a leading provider of out-sourced specialist distribution services supplying a broad range of products for their customers’ business operations. They are a global business with a turnover in excess of £4.5 Billion. bd2 have been commissioned to design and develop an online business tool for Bunzl’s Retail Supplies division which provides predominantly point of sale, packaging and print supplies to many leading high street retailers and multiples. The system will be used initially for a prestigious National retailer then rolled out to other customers with various bespoke elements adding to meet their specific business needs.
Our new rapid order entry site for longstanding client Ralawise, branded by ourselves as ‘RalawiseGO’, looks set to change the online experience for their business customers and possibly the industry’s approach to e-commerce. Ralawise are one of the biggest distribution companies of promotional clothing & leisurewear in Europe supplying business customers predominantly in the garment decoration industry – screenprinters and embroiderers. Speed of order is critical to these customers but with a huge range of over 2000 products from 68 brands and over 48,000 SKUs, navigating through them efficiently to firstly find, and then to order selections, places enormous emphasis on effective design. The rapid shop interface delivers the entire catalogue on one page enabling users to select from main categories, such as ‘tee shirts’; which then brings up a list of sub-categories, such as ‘crew neck’ or ‘fitted’; once selected, a simple list of the products is provided which can be filtered by brand; then, on clicking a product, all its specifications are displayed along with an image. This single page with columns approach allows users to ‘jump around’ from any category, sub-category or product without the many typically frustrating ‘back’ clicks. Once the logged-in user has found the product they want, they click ‘select’ to bring up a matrix of all colours and sizes available, along with prices, in a modal window. This further speeds the ordering process as the user can place any number of size and colour combinations in one go. On submission, the order disappears into the shopping basket leaving the user with the main interface. Users can choose to change the column structure to navigate by brand rather than product type as they prefer or, if they know the actual prodcut code, there is a quick search which incorporates predictive field-fill taking them straight to the relevant product matrix.
The site revolutionises the often cumbersome catalogue approach with it’s many layers and clicks back and forth which can be frustrating for the typical b2b customer who knows what they want and hasn’t got time to browse. The site has been developed as part of a phased approach to completely redeveloping Ralawise’s online presence. It has been designed and built entirely inhouse by bd2 andintegrates with Ralawise’s Sage ERP solution for seamless e-commerce. The site has been developed in less than 3 months including extensive testing and has now been soft-launched to selected Ralawise customers prior to an imminent full launch.
bd2 have designed and developed the brand and new website for Freshtl, a new business providing a range of services and products to enable online collaboration using leading edge ‘cloud’ based applications. These applications include LotusLive from IBM which is a collection of integrated collaboration tools and social networking services for business; Vondle Live to view large documents online without downloading; Vondle document management; Teampoint document control and compliance; RDP from IBM which provides a remote data storage and back up solution; And Bricscad a leading CAD platform.
More and more companies are discovering the benefits of working together online. With Cloud Computing there are no capital costs, no maintenance costs and no infrastructure costs. It works alongside your existing software and you only pay for the number of users you need. Freshtl are experts in Cloud Computing with a range of solutions to help businesses collaborate securely and effectively on line. bd2 will continue to provide a range of creative and marketing services to support the business’s plans which are for aggressive growth and flotation.
www.freshtl.com
bd2 have been selected, by Liverpool based Bullen Healthcare Group, as their creative marketing agency following a three way pitch. We were initially asked to develop a marketing concept and message to support the launch of a new and unique combined home delivery service. Collateral produced included a Welcome Pack, press ads for various industry journals, promotional items and direct mail pieces. We have since supported Bullen by designing various home delivery service communications for Discharging Nurses, Pharmacies and Patients and most recently we have designed both male and female brochures with medical illustrations along with exhibition banner stands in support of their new range of male and female prescription urology products.
Alastair Demick, National Marketing & Internal Sales Manager at Bullens comments:
“It was important that the creative for the launch of the new service was impactful but also unique to reflect the innovative nature of the service it was supporting. Advertising in our industry is sometimes guilty of including the odd cliché, so we needed our message to be fresh, loud and clear. bd2 understood this requirement and produced a solution that not only stood out from the other agencies, but clearly reflected the virtues of the service that we provide. We continue to use bd2 to provide us with design and marketing collateral and I’m delighted with the excellent creative we’ve received – which remains cliché free!”
bd2 has been selected by Wigan MBC to develop a major new website for their worklessness programme following a four way credentials pitch. The site will provide a centralised point of access to information on all of the projects and services available from all of the local service providers to the various target audiences – the long term unemployed, young people, single parents, individuals with ill health and disabilities, drugs and alcohol issues, employers and new businesses. The new 
site therefore, will need to be very user-friendly, easy to navigate and intuitive, providing relevant information in a structured manner to users of mixed intellectual and technical abilities. It is also intended to enable greater collaboration and sharing of information across the service providers themselves. A research exercise incorporating focus groups with the users and service providers to identify their key issues and fully define requirements is now underway.
