Hear from Harrison product designer, Charlotte Bush, on creating a fabric sample holder for national retailer, Dunelm.

Just two months into my product design career with Harrison, I started work on a project for one of our regular customers, the homeware retailer, Dunelm: could we produce a more economical solution to display pillowcases for customers to touch and feel the fabric? A very specific challenge that required a quick solution to accommodate an upcoming campaign.

We’ve worked with Dunelm for several years and we’re often asked whether we can improve a particular product to solve a particular problem or to design something innovative for a section of their store. However, taking this project from concept to shelf in just a matter of months wasn’t to be an easy task!

Providing the ideal solution…

That said, solving problems was one of the reasons I chose a career in product design; after establishing that I enjoyed maths and being creative, it seemed like the perfect fit! After some quick development, our solution was an injection moulded product that could securely hold fabrics of varying thickness (ideal for bedding, curtains, and linen); was easy to assemble and use; would fit securely to shelves; and could prominently display product information using a Harrison barker, as you can see in the yellow prototype below:

Introducing the new Fabric Sample Holder

We launched our Fabric Sample Holder in January 2022, just five months after receiving the initial brief. Currently being used in 157 Dunelm stores, with plans of a nationwide roll-out to all 170 sites, we’re all really pleased the project has been such a success. And hearing the CEO likes our solution, too, especially as it displays more material for customers to touch and feel (ideal for a retailer with such an enormous range of fabrics!) is very exciting.

I really enjoy being a product designer at Harrison; being presented with a problem and designing a solution, and then seeing my creation on the shelves in a national retailer is enormously rewarding. There is never too much time to ponder, however, as it’s on to the next design project to ensure our customers’ products are impossible to miss!

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By Charlotte Bush

Product Design Lead

A First-Class industrial design and technology graduate, Charlotte joined Harrison in 2021 as a technical designer following periods designing for a consumer electronics company and working at a product design consultancy designing for entrepreneurs and SMEs.

After just seven months of creating POS products at Harrison, Charlotte was promoted to product design lead, and working alongside three other designers, spends her day either thinking of solutions to customers’ POS problems, enhancing our current products or expanding our product offering by designing new innovative products.

Keen to explore the possible cost-saving benefits of replacing in-store paper price tickets with Electronic Shelf Edge Labels (ESELs), Morrisons sought a solution to securely hold their digital price labels in place on the shelf.

Morrisons contacted Harrison in 2019 to discuss their requirements and the challenge of fitting an ESEL to a conventional plastic data strip.  Our product development team visited the York store to observe the solutions their team had already tried such as mounting a secondary ESEL data strip to a paper data strip, quickly realising a bespoke solution was required.

A winning combination

After many months of store visits, and designing and testing possible options, we presented a solution that would securely fit store shelves and hold their ESELs. Bingo!

Seven stores and counting…

A trial of the new ESEL data strips commenced, beginning in the York store and rolling out to six other stores including Thornbury, Camden and Wood Green.

Product Development Manager, Douglas Cook, is excited to see Morrisons roll out the new data strips, and says, “Our bespoke data strips hold ESELs in different areas of their stores including produce, ambient, Market Street, refrigerated, BWS, and petrol fillings stations. Each area required different solutions, which we’ve designed and and improved over the last two years.

“I feel enormously proud to work with the product development team to create a unique solution to a problem. ESELs are commonplace in European retail stores, but the UK has been a little slow to adopt the digital technology which enables dynamic pricing to be controlled centrally from a head office location, saving a considerable amount of time and money in store.”

Morrisons will continue to trial the ESEL data strips throughout 2022 to determine the precise cost/time-saving benefit of digitising all price tickets in their 500+ stores.

Boost your PoS with Harrison

Interested to see how Harrison can help enhance your in-store PoS? Browse our case studies and see how we’ve helped B&Q, Homebase and Co-Op elevate their shelf appeal.