Bringing a brand into clear focus across photography, print & online

Focus Fireplaces, renowned for their craftsmanship and timeless designs, needed a refreshed approach to showcase their evolving and extensive range.

Client

Focus Fireplaces

Design

Helping Focus Fireplaces develop a brand standard to drive consistent high quality assets to match the quality of their products.

Print

Implementing a road map for high quality product photography and a range of a marketing collateral.

Web

Creating a clear structure to organise and explain a complicated product line to their customers.

Challenge

Focus Fireplaces supply a huge range of fireplaces across the country. With such a large variety of products, our challenge was ensuring that customers were able to find the information they needed and that each product was showcased effectively.

Focus needed a consistent approach that could seamlessly connect the print brochures to the website, ensuring a cohesive customer experience. 

High-end photography was essential to capture the intricate details and craftsmanship of each fireplace. 

Whilst customers in fireplace showrooms can lean on the experienced staff to guide them through the product range - users online or who have a brochure would need to be able to understand and navigate the product range themselves.  

The brochures and website would also have the key role of supporting stockists and furnishing them with the tools they needed to effectively retail the Focus range.

Approach

The starting point was redesigning the brochure collection, proposing a style with clean layouts to better inform stockists and customers on the details of each fireplace.

Following this design, we created a roadmap for product photography - helping design a custom set to complement the products at the customers factory. We then managed a series of photoshoots, providing art direction to ensure Focus were equipped with the high quality photography assets now and a plan for consistently photographing products into the future.

For the website, the focus was on creating a seamless and captivating user experience utilising the groundwork laid by the brochure and the understanding we had developed of the product lines throughout the process. We developed a clean, modern design with intuitive navigation, showcasing the product range with impactful visuals and engaging animations. We created a bespoke content management system (CMS) which allows Focus to promote their stockists and made a stockist support section allowing stockists access to print resolution photography assets.

Outcome

The combination of art direction and post production retouching has resulted in stunning product images which lead the way for a visually striking brochure.

The new website layout not only highlights the beauty of each fireplace but also provides an immersive browsing experience, encouraging customers to explore and engage.

The end result is a distinctive and cohesive approach which shows the Focus products in their best light, explains the range to customers and supports stockists.

Having managed some fairly major campaigns in my various roles throughout my career, my instinct for our re-launch and branding exercise was “I can handle this, no problems”. However I had underestimated the rigours of being a company owner and MD and quickly realised I needed some safe hands to manage this for me!

I’ve known Kevin and Luke for many years and whilst we’d not worked together for some time, I knew that Umber Creative would be perfect for managing the project from appointing the photographers, taking full responsibility for art direction, graphical styles, web development and planning the whole project through to completion – I was not disappointed, the Umber team take everything in their stride and integrated seamlessly with everyone here at Focus.

Umber has taken a real interest in what we do and how we do it, which has meant that we will move forward together with the knowledge that Umber are a valued part of our wider team.

Phil Holmes, Managing Director Focus Fireplaces

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