Pierhouse provides John Lewis tickets and signs

The service counter price tickets and the over-counter signage in the new 17,000 sq ft John Lewis Food Hall From Waitrose have been supplied by Pierhouse.

The deal marks a further collaboration between the two organisations, which have been working together since 1989.

The project combines Pierhouse's expertise in the provision of in-store marketing solutions with its creative skills: the price tickets and signs for the meat, cheese, fish and wine departments, which advise customers on product provenance and special attributes, are in keeping with the overall look created by design consultants JHP.

Providing tickets for service counter areas is a complex challenge due to the variety of pricing/weight issues and changing requirements, as well as those relating to Health and Safety.

Waitrose required a company that could manage the entire project - from sourcing the base material for the tickets and signage and developing a layout and style for the data and the images, to formulating the process to capture individual product information and generating the tickets and signage for the launch, as well as handling re-ordering and new items on a regular basis.

Pierhouse decided to meet the challenge by creating a process based on its proven automated artworking solution, which can feed print-ready pdfs to printers anywhere in the world, and which was already producing tickets for Waitrose supermarkets.

The benefit of this system is that it can produce 2,000 unique artworks every hour, whereas a traditional studio is only able to create 10 an hour.

These artworks include text and full-colour images and a range of layouts to reproduce key promotional themes consistently.

As every piece of print has an asset number, staff can easily request duplicates through the Branch Request System that links into the Pierhouse solution.

Pierhouse's system allows Waitrose to place orders for replacement tickets up to 4pm on any day and receive precise, personalised tickets the very next day.

More than 80,000 variants are held on the system.

While Pierhouse already held some product information, 20 per cent of the overall items available in the new Food Hall were exclusive so new data and images had to be captured and incorporated.

Pierhouse's design team created a look for the tickets and signage with a textural, natural feel and colour that reflected the overall design of the space.

Steve Scott, Department Manager, Point of Sale Administration, Waitrose, said: "Pierhouse was chosen for both its knowledge and expertise in providing store specific ticketing and customer communications, as well as the efficiency it has demonstrated with the other Waitrose projects".

The Food Hall, in the basement of John Lewis in London's Oxford Street, provides an assortment of everyday grocery items alongside "artisan" foods, with the emphasis on seasonality, provided by local and regional British suppliers as well as international producers.

The architecturally striking space has been influenced by the food halls of Tokyo's department stores, Swiss food emporia and Parisian food boutiques.

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