Wegmans
01 Challenge
How can you simply and clearly explain an entirely new concept in food retailing to shoppers of a major supermarket chain?
Wegmans Food Markets, Inc. is a 71-store U.S. regional supermarket chain with stores in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, and Maryland. Food Network recognized it with its award for Best Grocery Store in 2007.
Wegmans planned to introduce their innovative Take It or Make It promotional program. They would give customers the choice of buying delicious and healthy Asian Bowls (stir fried Asian food) or soups, freshly prepared in the store (Take It) or providing all the ingredients for those same dishes, and their recipes, for those who wanted to make their own. The message was simple and elegant: Sometimes you feel like cooking, We help you make it. Sometimes you don’t, We help you take it. Take it or make it.
They decided on a web-based motion graphics animation to explain the concept simply and graphically. The animation had to carry the existing Wegmans’ look and feel, and show the different kinds of delicious meals that are available on the menu. It should use existing photographs from the Menu magazine, and integrate them seamlessly with the animated vector graphics. An interactive menu would appear after the animation finished playing on screen.
02 Solution
Wegmans chose Dumbwaiter Design to develop the animation.
We created simple, yet very elegant illustrations that would be animated to show what Take It or Make It means. Animated type was also used to explain the concept between animation segments. The photographic images of the food give a sense of realism and balance to the piece. Detailed storyboards were created and shown to the Wegmans team.
We ported the illustrations and images to Adobe After Effects to create the animations. We also used Cinema 4D (3D Software) to create the effects of the bubbles that float from the cooking pot in the opening scene. After the animation was approved, we designed a simple music soundtrack, to give the piece a warm, jazzy feel. We developed a custom Flash video player with the Wegmans look and feel. It displayed an interactive menu at the end of the animation, so that viewers could explore the different menu items on the Wegmans website, or print coupons for the take out dishes.
03 Result
The Wegmans Take It or Make It campaign has been very successful. Many customers had read recipes in Wegmans Menu magazine, or even sampled the dishes in the store, but just didn’t take the next step in making the dish themselves. Being able to Take the same dish that they could Make, made it more likely that they did both!
Andrea Zuegel was the Wegmans Advertising Account Manager who hired Dumbwaiter Design. She now has an Internet Strategy consulting company. “What was so terrific about working with them,” she said, “is that Dumbwaiter immediately got what we wanted. We had no experience doing website animation, but they seemed to be able to digest the scenarios we gave them and translate them, without us even knowing.”
