Abode Classically brochure

The brief

Abode make taps, sinks and brassware for kitchens and bathrooms from their base in Barnsley. Classically is their traditional range, and its brochure design has one job: to sit in kitchen showrooms and go home with the customers who are deciding what goes over their sink.

Abode’s brief was plain about what had gone wrong with the last one. The products were too crammed together. A traditional tap is bought on its detail, the shape of the spout, the lever, the finish, and a page that packs six of them in side by side gives none of that room to be seen.

They wanted the new brochure dark and premium. There was one catch. Perrin & Rowe already use dark and gold throughout. A brochure that simply went dark and gold would look like theirs on the same stand.

So the brief was to find a premium look that belonged to Abode, and to give every collection in the range the space it had been missing.

The approach

We took the colour from the taps rather than from the shelf the brochure would sit on. Classically comes in chrome, brushed nickel and antique brass, and the brass finish gave us the warmth Abode had asked for without borrowing anyone else’s gold. It is their product’s own colour, so it cannot be mistaken for a competitor’s.

The cover does very little, on purpose. It is black board with the name foil blocked, and nothing else on it. The board and the foil tell the customer something about the range before they have opened it.

Inside, the fix for crammed pages was room. Each collection is given room, so the taps are shown large enough to judge the detail they are bought on. Alongside each one sit a drawing and the codes for every tap, so the same pages work for the customer choosing it and for the showroom ordering it.

What was done

The finished brochure runs to forty-eight pages, with a black board cover, foil blocked, and brass running through the pages inside. Every collection in the Classically range has room of its own, with its drawing and the codes for every tap, so it works as a showroom sales tool and as a reference for the trade.

Abode reprinted it seven months after it first went out.

The brochure is one of around fifteen jobs we have done with Abode, and it sits at the quiet end of the range. The loud end is the exhibition work: the stand at KBB at the NEC, stand graphics for B&Q and Wickes, Howdens Expo and the Pronteau stand. Between the two sit showroom graphics, adverts, launch graphics, range identifiers and point of sale.

Each of those is briefed by a different person at Abode, with their own budget and their own deadline. Keeping them looking like one company is our part of it, whether the job is a forty-eight page brochure or a sign on a trade stand.