25 years of WIN: design at the cutting edge

For 25 years, the design agency WIN Creating Images has not only been designing packaging, but also taking care of branding, communication and brand management. Clients such as Lindt & Sprüngli, dm, Teekanne and Emmi appreciate the all-round support and have been loyal to the agency for years.

In 1997, the South African-born artist and trained glass painter Cathrin Jo Ann Wind founded her agency in Aachen - together with her husband Luc Bütz, who was responsible for acquisitions and finances and joined the company as an additional managing director in 2006. „The agency grew quickly, initially in Aachen, then with offices in Cologne, Munich (from 2012 to 2017) and Berlin. We opened our first international office in Zug, Switzerland, in 2019,“ says Luc Bütz. More and more creative employees were hired and new customers acquired: Lindt & Sprüngli, dm, Teekanne, Brandt, Penny, Tetesept, Rewe, Warsteiner, Migros - the list is long.

„In the early years, we were purely a design agency, and packaging design is of course still the core of what we do today. Everything revolves around creativity. At that time, however, we wanted to become even more visual and in 2006 we brought the photography division into the company with WINphotography and opened our first own photo studio in Aachen.“

Luc Bütz, Managing Director WIN Creating Images

Customers increasingly asked for strategic expertise, and so the company began to WIN The introduction of various units began in 2005: Final artwork, workshops, trends, sustain and social media gradually became their own business units, and the WIN Neo unit was officially established in 2021. „WIN Neo takes on the strategic part, brand management, branding and communication. After all, the packaging is the most important advertising medium for a product. People take it home with them and look at it again and again. There is a lot of strategic thinking behind this, which we bundle with the WIN Neo unit. This is also where the topics of trends and sustainability are located, and we organise workshops with customers that go very well.“

Today, more than 100 creatives and strategists work in the three units WIN Design, WIN Neo and WIN Lifestyle, in which the lifestyle and beauty brands are located. The units provide the right framework for the focal points of strategy, trend and innovation, packaging design, sustainability, lifestyle and photography, so that WIN can develop into a leading brand. can position itself even more strongly as a specialist and at the same time work on a project-by-project basis. In 2008, company founder Cate Wind was honoured as „Vision“ Entrepreneur of the Year, and just ten years later her agency was able to call itself the largest owner-managed packaging design and trend agency in the DACH markets.

Long-standing partnerships with customers

The agency is particularly proud of its long-standing customer relationships and the associated joint developments. First and foremost: the chocolate brand Lindt & Sprüngli. „We've been working with Lindt for 19 years, which means we've been with the company longer than many of its employees,“ says Luc Bütz. „In 2012, we were then Lindt Hello and have thus developed an international benchmark case. Even today, customers not only come from the confectionery/food sector, but also from Beverage, Beauty, Home & Living with the wish ‚We want something like Hello!‘

At the time, Lindt had recognised that the market presence of its product portfolio was not attractive enough for an important part of society: the younger target group between 25 and 45 years of age. WIN suggested that a launch a new sub-brand that appeals to this target group without alienating the existing customer base. The calculation worked out, and today Lindt Hello is a successful, award-winning brand.

The company has not only created the right lifestyle brand and the right packaging design, but has also also provides the right input for the development of new flavours and seasonal limited editions based on our own trend research. In the year following its launch, Lindt increased its sales in the newly tapped market by 33.8 million euros, while WIN was honoured with the German Marketing Award and the Red Dot Award for design quality for its concept and design. The development of the Hello range is not standing still: The latest addition is vegan chocolate, packaged in environmentally friendly grass cardboard.

„Brands have to keep their finger on the pulse if they want to remain successful. There are always trends and counter-trends, a revival of the traditional or completely new impulses. But it takes courage to change something and to take the risk of messing something up,“ says Luc Bütz.

On board early

We are always on board at an early stage and support a project from planning to print approval. „We are also occasionally involved in production at the printing press when a new process or a new range is involved.“ As was the case with the dm brand Balea: „The dm Balea Facerange, for example, involved over 150 products. The new design was printed on cardboard packaging, labels, PET and as a no-label - a design for a wide variety of materials.“ The drugstore chain has been part of WIN's customer base for 14 years and is the customer with the highest turnover. „The Balea brand is the most popular personal care brand in Germany after Nivea and is now recognised as a brand in its own right - with cult status. Together with dm, we are constantly developing the brand further, because contemporary design and shelf leadership are playing an increasingly important role in sales success.“

WIN also looks after other dm own brands such as Babylove, Denk mit, Ebelin, Ivorell, Langhaarmädchen & Co and was most recently significantly involved in the brand development of dm Pro Climate in 2021, for which dm was the first company to develop its own products, which are are not only climate-neutral, but even environmentally neutral.

Brands have to move

Traditional brands will have an increasingly difficult time in the future, says Luc Bütz. „Start-ups with their innovative ideas can really hurt the big players, because small, young companies don't have to be everybody's darling. Lindt, for example, has a huge range of products, whereas a start-up can make small, targeted offers. It is therefore becoming increasingly important for large brands to behave like start-ups, i.e. to become smaller and more agile. Hello is a good example of this. Well-known brands used to think that they didn't have to adapt to their customers. Today, we have a fragmented market in which many individuals no longer want to be mainstream. People are looking for tailor-made products, want to be eco, colourful and bold, but also sustainable. That is the challenge for manufacturers, and we have to listen to what the customer wants. Because driven by the start-ups, the big players have to move.“

Many major brands have already tried sub-brands in recent years. The question is always: How close to, how far away from the umbrella brand can it be? Remedy manufacturer Tetesept, for example, wanted to enter the wellness sector with new products. „Years ago, it seemed unthinkable to address completely new target groups in this way. It worked with the new t: by brand - different design, new consumer group, but the same good quality.“ And WIN was honoured with a Red Dot Award.

On a journey of discovery with the customer

The agency often goes on a journey of discovery with its clients. Last year, for example, the Swiss Migros launched a social media campaign in which the Migros community was able to vote on the new design of the ice cream brand M-Budget Tastea. WIN had realised two designs for this. Over 76,000 votes were cast on Instagram and Tiktok in a day and a half, after which the brand's new outfit was finalised. „Here we focussed on the interplay of zeitgeist, design and transport via social media. The interplay between packaging design and social media was important here, because the packaging designs had to be directly social media-compatible and work on Instagram, Tiktok & Co.“

The design agency is constantly trying out new things. It started with trend scouting 15 years ago, and three years ago introduced innovation sprints in addition to trend presentations, for example. „At first we still had to convince our customers, but today the programme is a bestseller.“ With the Innovation Sprints, WIN has developed a tool to find a new design together with customers after just a few days. It usually takes one to two years to develop new packaging designs. That was far too long for WIN.

For the Innovation Sprints you get the decision-makers in a company out of their day-to-day business for a short time and sets out together in search of new ideas - After a trend safari in a metropolis, ideas are collected, concepts are written and finally consumers are interviewed on site to find out which ideas are popular and which are not. The aim is to discuss projects with top-level management in start-up style.

Twelve Red Dot Awards

In addition to other awards, the company is particularly proud of the twelve Red Dot Awards it has won to date. The most recent was last year for the imaginative packaging design of the Warsteiner beer liqueur. The task here was entirely to the taste of the design agency: to create a bold, completely different packaging and to approach the design concept with complete freedom. „We are always delighted when customers dare to take this step with us,“ says Luc Bütz. In the company's history to date, it has also won a Pentaward, German Brand Awards, Good Design Awards and the German Sustainability Award for Design.

And in the future? „We still want to We are currently positioning ourselves further into the lifestyle and luxury segments. Then, of course, sustainability is the big, overarching topic, where there are always new trends. Internationalisation is very exciting for us, because that's the direction we want to go in.“ To this end, Cate Wind and her daughter will soon be spending three months in New York to gather new impetus and ideas for their work. „And who knows, maybe there will soon be a WIN office in New York,“ says Luc Bütz.

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