We decided that the best way to reach parents is through their kids. And we know kids like to play with their food, so we made Wellington’s Tomato Sauce fun.

Over the course of several months, we created and designed several original kid-friendly characters. We let kids choose their favourite three, who we named Eyeball, Dragon and Vamp Princess.

We turned these characters into fun lids, through which kids could squirt Wellington’s Tomato Sauce. And we branded them “The WellingTops”, with their own WellingTops logo. We tooled and tested the WellingTops specifically to fit only on bottles of Wellington’s Tomato Sauce.

To help kids engage even more with the WellingTops, we created an illustrated story book about their origins. And then we took them into supermarkets, where every parent who bought two large bottles of Wellington’s Tomato Sauce received a free WellingTop for their kid.

Our two most important design considerations were the link between the WellingTops and the mother brand, Wellington’s Tomato Sauce, and the need to make the WellingTops appeal to kids. We went through several rounds of original character development, consulting actual kids along the way, before turning our concept drawings into 3D CAD renders. We worked with colour schemes that both complemented the mother brand and stood out against the bottle’s label and the redness of the tomato sauce.

Then we created bespoke moulds and sourced plastics and inks were non-toxic and durable.Design touch points included DL flyers, full colour posters and an A5 illustrated storybook about where the WellingTops each came from, around the neck of each promotional bottle of Wellington’s Tomato Sauce, all printed on wood-free, forest-friendly LumiArc paper for the best possible repro quality of detailed illustration.

All consumers who we interviewed bought Wellington’s Tomato Sauce for both the free gift of the WellingTop, which drew them in, and the taste test, which we offered them at the same time.

Production costs of the WellingTops ran at approximately ZAR 4 (USD 0.30) per unit, which meant that the price of two bottles of WellingTops and cost to client of the WellingTop combined, remained lower than the price of two bottles of the market leading tomato sauce.

Thanks to the WellingTops, Wellington’s Tomato Sauce left the shelves at a rate of 380% higher than average daily sales.

Daily sales of Wellington’s Tomato Sauce also outperformed daily sales of the market leading tomato sauce (our major competitor) by 224%.