Coley Porter Bell has helped location-based business Inish Turk Beg enter the FMCG brand arena by developing packaging for a range of premium, artisan-made fish and meat products. The agency has created the brand and produced packaging designs for smoked tuna, mackerel and salmon as well as back and streaky bacon. As part of a ‘top-down’ distribution strategy they’ll be sold initially only in the most exclusive outlets. The new products will be rolled out to other outlets during 2010.

Pack designs emphasise Inish Turk Beg’s unique positioning by sidestepping category conventions. Instead of showing the product through windows in a plastic pack, which is the norm in packaged fish and bacon, cardboard wallets open to reveal the vacuum packed product. Quality signals come from minimalist typography, the colour palette and striking photography.

A spit-roast boar appears on the front of the bacon packaging, while the fish products depict a boar fishing. At the same time Coley Porter Bell created branded punctuation for the pack copy. A sea horse is used for a comma, a pair of sea gulls are quotation marks and a fish is used for hyphens.

“These are extremely sophisticated designs for a sophisticated brand aimed at a sophisticated clientele. It has been a fascinating process discovering what are the design triggers that will help Inish Turk Beg command a premium of several hundred percent in quite every day sectors,” said Vicky Bullen, CEO of Coley Porter Bell.