Hundreds of new Berkley Jensen and Wellsley Farms packages are hitting the shelves at BJ’s Wholesale Club thanks to an own brands consolidation and redesign project in partnership with CBX, the brand agency and retail design consultancy.
The brand consolidation project streamlined the BJ’s brand portfolio to create greater clarity, awareness, and focus, explains Kris Modugno, assistant vice president of own brands for BJ’s Wholesale Club. “Instead of managing ten separate own brands across multiple categories, as we did before, we have now rolled our food items into Wellsley Farms and our non-food items into Berkley Jensen — both have the strongest brand equity and loyalty among our Members. The result is a rationalized platform of own brands, which better positions BJ’s Wholesale Club for future growth.”
“BJ’s Wholesale Club is at the forefront in terms of commitment to the quality of its own brands products, and they needed to design the brands strategically to more effectively communicate this reality,” says Todd Maute, a partner and private label branding specialist at CBX. “For both Wellsley Farms and Berkley Jensen, the new design systems created are consistent enough to provide impactful identities on shelf and flexible enough to speak to individual product features and benefits, as well as to specific consumer targets.”
To enforce consistency, CBX used the pack as a vehicle for sharing stories about both the high-quality sourcing and certification of all Wellsley Farms products, and the best-in-class manufacturing methods and beneficial features of products in the Berkley Jensen line. That might mean emphasizing the German-engineered, triple-ply construction of stainless-steel cookware, or highlighting the responsibly-sourced, premium-quality seafood.
Graphically, CBX employed design architectures with all-new photography, logos, fonts and other visual and narrative elements. “Oversized photography, as well as strong, bold color highlighted the features and benefits on packs for both lines and gave us lots of flexibility with which to tell the stories of these brands,” Maute says.
For Wellsley Farms, in particular, CBX used consistent structure to underscore attributes such as “fresh” and “quality,” notes Rick Barrack, founding partner and chief creative officer. “We also put a major emphasis on telling BJ’s Members all about the sourcing of these products — whether you’re talking about Wellsley Farms Whole-Bean Coffee from Papua New Guinea or its Italian Marinara Sauce made from San Marzano tomatoes,” Barrack says. In support of this, Wellsley Farm’s seal-like logo conveys the notion of a “stamp of approval.”
The comprehensive brand extension affects more than 800 food and nonfood SKUs at 208 warehouse clubs across the East Coast. As part of the project, CBX also redesigned pallet skirts, shippers, ads, promotional videos, membership brochures and other touch points that are a big part of the experience at BJ’s.
“This new approach will help educate our Members on how these own brands products meet their needs of value, freshness, selection and quality,” says David Atkins, vice president of own brands for BJ’s Wholesale Club.
As an organization, BJ’s Wholesale Club showed extraordinary commitment to its own brands throughout this project, Maute notes. “From senior management down to marketing and procurement, just about every department at BJ’s was involved,” he said. “The support we received was thoughtful and broad-based. Clearly, BJ’s is dedicated to maximizing the success of these brands.”
