Tesco

Keeping Tesco feeling fresh year after year

Maintaining Tesco’s position as Britain’s number one retailer has demanded creative innovation, collaboration, and exploration. From retail packaging design to point-of-sale toolkits, we have crafted new brands from scratch and breathed new life into existing lines, transforming them into fresh, exciting prospects. This project focused on retail packaging design to make Tesco’s products stand out on shelf and engage shoppers.

Fresh produce brands, exclusively as Tesco

Tesco’s own brands are a key driver of their customer loyalty. Tesco Value was launched in 1993 and quickly became a trusted favourite.

Nearly three decades later, however, the range was seen as cheap and low-quality, and shoppers were turning to discounters – believing they could get the same product at a lower price.

Cowan created seven new tertiary ‘fresh produce’ farm brands, including Redmere Farms and Boswell Farms, using retail packaging design to showcase quality, fresh produce at low prices and make the brands stand out on shelf.

We also developed the brand strategy and identity for a further eight unique food brands by delving into Tesco’s heritage archive. We identified opportunities for the retailer to revive T.E Stockwell’s tea from the 1920’s alongside a range of new cupboard essentials – Cowan designed over 300 SKUs.

Tesco’s Hearty Food Co. went on to be the biggest chilled ready-meal range to launch that year, and these new brands now feature in almost two-thirds of customers’ baskets.

Creating a one-brand solution for General Merchandise

Dated inconsistently and with confusing packaging Tesco General Merchandise was losing touch with customers. To us, the solution was clear: merge the entire General Merchandise range into one cohesive, user-friendly look and feel that made shopping at Tesco both easy and inspiring.

We created a retail packaging design system that showcased features that eased quality concerns for products at value price points, with evocative imagery for max appeal. Brand signifiers navigated customers through the category with clarity, making for a consistent messaging hierarchy. Assets such as photography, background colours and textures were designed to easily flex across category, enabling the packaging design to let the product adopt key category codes and semiotics where necessary.

Redefining Tesco Beauty & Personal Care

Invited to design brand identities for new skin, beauty, and personal care range. We leveraged our beauty category expertise with consumer needs – who were seeking affordability, value, and quality. The design solution cut through the clutter, focusing on product functionality and reinforced value while maintaining quality cues.

We’ve worked with Tesco to create in-store toolkits for their seasonally-driven communications calendar for the last seven years. Be it creating a campaign from scratch, or shining a shopper-centric lens on existing campaigns – we’ve consistently worked to enhance brand and quality perceptions, effectively setting Tesco apart from the rest.

“I had the pleasure of working with Cowan on the Tesco GM packaging redesign. We worked collaboratively to bring to life the new brand proposition on pack for over 2700 own label home products. It was a complex design brief with over 30 different categories to wrap our heads around whilst navigating new ways of working to develop creative during lockdown. Cowan’s diligent and detailed approach to the planning and strategic design was fundamental to the success of this redesign. They worked tirelessly throughout the 18 months to get under the skin of each subcategory and developed a design system that not only elevated the product quality but would stand the test of time. The quality of the work was exceptional and the team were highly responsive and always open to new idea’s. A great experience all round.”

Caroline Acaster
Former GM Design Manager Design, Tesco