Design as First Aid: The Wallace Cameron Company

Design Management Review, Summer 2004 by Wood, Bruce

The idea was rather old and tired. But transformed by design, it became a product line that brought new life to the company and its revenues. Bruce Wood narrates the tale of a corporation in which the redesign of a product, along with the redesign of marketing and production, ultimately inspired plans for a more diverse and promising long-term business strategy.

For more than 50 years, the Wallace Cameron Company has been a presence in the city center of Glasgow, Scotland. Originally founded to supply first aid kits to industry, the firm eventually expanded into the retail sector. In 1994, Giovanni Benedetti, chairman of Benedetti International PIc, purchased Wallace Cameron (figure 1). Benedetti International had made its mark in the health, hygiene, and paper industries, and Giovanni Benedetti had a reputation for helping mature businesses grow into new sectors and improve their bottom lines.

When Benedetti took control of Wallace Cameron, the business was operating out of a building dating from the 1960s. Its products and services had matured and were under constant attack on cost from a range of international competitors. The company employed 90 people and had annual revenues of $6.75 million. In 2000, under Benedetti's direction, Wallace Cameron moved its operations to a new $4.5 million facility located in Wishaw, a town outside Glasgow (figure 2). The company now boasts annual revenues of $30 million and employs 160 people on the factory site and 140 agents in the field; in its sector, it's now the largest company in the UK and a major player in Europe. Indeed, one Wallace Cameron customer runs a distribution network of 1,200 retail outlets across Europe.

What happened in those four short years?

Beginnings

Shortly after Benedetti took over, he instigated an extensive program of research into what the marketplace and competitors-domestic and international-were offering. The conclusion: Wallace Cameron was looking at a market that was not only mature but also saturated. Competition was almost exclusively based on price. Was there an opportunity for a new approach to the market here? As Benedetti pointed out, although the company had survived "40 years of the same box," it was time to take a radically new approach, one that would differentiate it clearly from the competition.

The data retrieved from the original research program became the basis of a designled process aimed at finding this new approach. The primary objective of the development program was to place users and clients at the front of the development process, while incorporating any findings, results, and research data gleaned from the original analysis.

Design

Wallace Cameron had no internal design resources, so it began a search for a consultant. A referral made to Benedetti by a personal friend eventually netted the right designer, and the company soon established a program investing $375,000 in the design, development, and prototyping of a new product. The company was aided in this by the Glasgow Collection, a design support and promotion agency, which supported the design and development of the new product range with funding and, later, with publicity.

In studying the product, Benedetti and his designer established a few basic truths about first-aid kits. For example, two groups interact with a first-aid kit: the client (the individual requiring treatment), and the user (the administering individual). The client needs to be reassured by a product whose aesthetics imply cleanliness and orderliness. The user is faced with a potentially tense situation that requires orderly thinking and efficient actions. A client who is calm and trusting makes the whole process easier for the user. It is also important, post-use, that the user be able to readily identify components that need to be reordered, replaced, and further maintained.

Keeping in mind the objective requirements for size, volume, and so on, the designer settled on a first-aid kit that employed a modular strategy, thus enabling product extensions and modifications. The kits would come in two sizes; the modular format would allow for more than one color, as well as some variation in internal detail (see figure 3).

The new design featured a two-piece outer casing (the two pieces consisting of lid and base), which incorporated an improved hinge and snap-fit closing. The color variations and transparent plastics offered possibilities for market segmentation, including house-brand products and customization for specific vendors. Moreover, the new design was very identifiable-an almost iconic shape that separated and clearly distinguished it from competing products. When prototypes were shown to significant users and user groups, it was clear that Wallace Cameron had hit on something. The approach was absolutely new to the market and thus created the perception of higher value, offering differentiation into market areas such as burns kits, skin care, and baby care. The overall effect was to move the Wallace Cameron Company and its products into a new, higher-value market, leaving its competition to the challenges of a marketplace driven by cost.