Unilever
Re-imagining the supermarket
detergent aisle
2016
Industrial Design
About
Hindustan Unilever had a category problem. Indian customers were accustomed to a single-product approach to laundry: one detergent, job done. HUL had strong products across the category: Surf Excel for hand washing, a separate formulation for machine washing, and Comfort fabric conditioner. But customers weren't connecting the dots. Hand wash and machine wash detergents were used interchangeably, and fabric conditioner - a relatively new introduction to the Indian market - was largely seen as unnecessary.
The internal brief was "category management": rather than competing for shelf space, HUL wanted their laundry products to live together harmoniously and communicate to customers that they were designed to be used as a system, not in isolation. They approached FITCH to design a shelf experience that would make that case.
Design process
The central behavioural challenge was that detergent shopping runs on autopilot. Customers move through the aisle in System 1 mode :reaching for familiar products without stopping to read, compare, or consider. Any communication that required active attention was going to be ignored.
The solution was to redesign the shelf itself as a communication tool. Rather than individual product displays competing for attention, the shelf was reorganized to reflect the multi-step washing process; guiding customers through the logic of pre-wash, wash, and post-wash in the physical sequence of the products. A series of in-shelf displays were designed to interrupt the autopilot moment and quickly communicate the case for using Surf Excel and Comfort together.
I handled all the 3D design and modelling work on the project; graphic and 2D elements were developed by other designers at FITCH.
