Birthday Buddies Hamper

Create a collection of unusual Birthday Hampers for out of the box thinkers looking for something unusual with no specific gender bias to avoiding stereotyping but instead a light suggestive hint, completely over-ridable on the basis of individual human preferences. Whilst the dominant focus was on Imagination, Quality and Value, these Birthday Hampers needed to be differentiated, modern and brand distinguishable from the mass hamper market. At the same time they needed to stand out in the highly competitive general Birthday Gift market with their reassuringly familiar contents synonymous with Birthday Hampers.

We’re not really a hamper company, so we have a massive advantage when it comes to designing Birthday Hampers. Maybe people see us as being a Hamper company, but our mission was to create the greatest gifts in the world for your friends and family back home. Since our focus is on this design & development, the issue of the complexity of delivering our Birthday Hampers becomes a vital consideration. How could we design Birthday Hampers, which were what shoppers considered to be a hamper, but still bring an innovative novel approach to the party. How could we appeal to the desire for something unusual, without diverging too far from the key characteristics people associated with their ideal Birthday Hampers.

The pursuit of something unusual meant that this had to be a strategic marketing challenge, Our location and our infrastructure dictated that we could not just have the best products nor could we simply be the most efficient. Even ostentatious differentiation in the Birthday Hamper Market would not be sufficient.. We had to produce a range of unusual Birthday Hampers across multiple markets, in a variety of fields of interest and in multiple dimensions of consumer appeal. Our “unusual Birthday Hampers” needed to have 3 or 4 axis of comparative touchstones in order to be easily compared with not only our competitors, but also internally within our own product offering. It was only then that the innovation of the Birthday Hamper could be clearly distinguished. The proposition we wanted to make to our customers would not be to buy an Unusual Birthday Hamper from Baskets Galore, as a once off, but to select from a choice of our Birthday hampers, some being more unusual than others and let your own imagination decide what was unusual and what was simply being creative.

We wanted to be unusual and we wanted to tap into the cheerful aspect of celebrating a Birthday. Yet “unusual” needed to be carefully managed and downplayed in terms of budget, it needed to be charmingly cute, it didn’t need to be stand out and put people off. Product selection by our customers was analysed over a number of 6 year control periods from start-up days when Google wasn’t even the dominant search engine to the modern day when data is analysed by marketing institutions and sold back to us with its recommendations, which are simply not sophisticated enough to follow the chaotic or critical narratives of humans. Such recommendations should be treated with a huge pinch of salt. This meant that we were not being blinded by science nor mesmerised by the art of intelligently designed successful products. It also meant that we were not constricted or limiting ourselves to conventional and established views. There was room for improvement, but we could apply a generous smattering of political common sense in terms of defining the limited objectives of our Unusual Birthday Hampers.

We wanted our Birthday Hampers to have a professional & distinctive feel to them. Being Different didn’t stop at different products. Any sign of appearing cheap or any sense of home-made amateurishness needed to be banished comprehensively. We would be different because we stood out as professional. Co-ordination of Birthday colours, namely yellow, pale blue, orange and reds would be stressed. A clear definition of the amusing and playful Birthday message through symbolism associated with our Playful Birthday Friend would make our Birthday Hampers distinctly more fun to receive than the conventional Birthday Hamper.

Out went the wicker hamper. The traditional wicker container is not sustainable for Europe going forward. Rattan doesn’t grow here in commercial quantities. Feedback from shoppers clearly depicted demonstrated that there was no longer an association of premiumness with wicker that they were prepared to pay for, so long as what was on offer was tastefully appropriate for display. We thought outside, inside and around the box. We craved something visual, something useful and we wanted our recipients to have the option of extending the life of the container because of its utility value. We commissioned our own in-house task force drawing upon our experience as designers. We designed a box perfect for a Hamper designation, ideally applicable to being a Birthday Hamper and customisable to a range of other gift occasions when you may consider a hamper.

Creating something as sophisticated as this is intended to appeal to an international clientele focused on delivering a Better Hamper for Birthdays. This level of product development and investment in terms of our time and resources could not be justified on a local, regional or even a national bias. We hope that our “Fun Friend” Birthday Hampers will strike a chord with fun loving people the world over who want to send a Birthday Hamper, which is just a little bit more fun and brings more happiness into the world.