SnS Design Designed Portable Air Conditioner and First Braille Enhanced Remote Control For Amana
From concept-to-commercialization, SnS Design is sensitive to the everyday challenges that companies face in optimizing time-to-market product development cycles.
| “Our challenge has been to educate both our sales team and national retailers with respect to the Amana heritage of high quality design, exclusive technology innovations, and relevance for today’s consumers. We approached SNS Design to help us develop an animation sales tool that could be used to train our Amana sales team, and be used by our retail partners to convey the compelling health benefits of the exclusive Amana UV air purifier technology featured across the entire Amana room air conditioner line. The Amana branding team partnered with SNS Design to craft a dynamic product animation that combined photography, animation, text, music, and informative voice over. The resulting animation was so effective in communicating the exclusive family health benefits of the integral UV air purification technology that two of our larger customers will be running a looping DVD of the animation at hundreds of retail locations in 2011.”
Bob Nathan |
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SnS Design, a woman owned and operated global design consultancy, commissioned to work with Haier America to design a new line of Amana portable air conditioners. The Amana brand is licensed by Haier for room air conditioning, portable air conditioning, and dehumidification. “Rather than proceed with just a cosmetic redesign, we provided deep insights into home design trends, human factors, that ultimately yielded industry leading product design solutions,” said Nisha Sawhney, CEO of SnS Design.
The barrier free braille MagnaClik® remote control is an industry first feature, and differentiated the Amana brand with retail buyers. SnS Design empowered the Amana portable AC brand for substantial sales growth in 2011, enabling Haier to gain sales with select retailers such as Costco.
“While there are many design firms offering product development services, it takes a partnering philosophy to navigate the tollgates associated with licensed product development projects,” said Sawhney. She added that corporate product and brand managers are faced with challenges such as implementation of brand guidelines as they relate to logos, product, packaging, use and care guides, catalogs, advertising, and sales tool development.
SnS design understands that in addition to design innovation, they play an important role in collaborating with, and supporting their clients, for every step of the licensing process. “From concept-to-commercialization, SnS Design is sensitive to the everyday challenges that companies face in optimizing time-to-market product development cycles for licensed brands,” says Andy Ziegler, Senior Brand Marketing Manager, Haier. “In addition to offering superior product design, packaging, and branding services, SnS Design offers value added services such as complimentary market trend research and competitive landscape analysis of price and features….services other design firms charge for,” added Ziegler.
