We love our athletics. We love our athletes. Few grasp this as much as Wilson, creator of sporting good and equipment for nearly a century, who have been influential and intimately involved in shaping the games of tennis, golf, baseball and American football. You’ve likely kicked, hit, or shot a ball designed and manufactured by Wilson. Likewise, you’ve probably seen the professionals and masters in their sports, swing, shoot, carry or wear Wilson gear. All major sporting events around the world use Wilson products and each division at Wilson is dedicated to making them the best. This goes for the visuals as well, with so many telling the story of the athletes. The Creative Services at Wilson use KeyShot in the development of visuals that define a product, a brand, and ultimately, a generation of professional athletes. We find out more about the process and how they use KeyShot.
What do the Creative Services at Wilson encompass?
The Creative Services team at Wilson is the in-house design agency of choice for all MarComm, product, packaging, interactive and online design. This creative team is broken into three groups – Golf Creative, Racquet Creative and Baseball / Inflatable Creative – to manage the entire range of global creative for all of Wilson’s sports categories. These creative teams service the marketing teams and product line managers for each of these specific business units.
The Golf creative team specifically has adapted the KeyShot application into their workflow to elevate the services they provide in product design, creative asset building and interactive design. This team is at the forefront of utilizing KeyShot on a daily basis to enhance the vast amount of creative they touch day to day.
What are some project highlights at Wilson?
Project highlights for the Golf Creative team include:
- Product Brand Ideation
- Product Design
- Interactive Consumer Focused Design
- Experiential In-Store Design
What would you say is unique about the design process at Wilson?
The gamut of work that the Golf Creative Team handles on a global scale is quite substantial and unique for an in-house creative team. Projects range anywhere from product design, interactive design, traditional graphic design to brand development. This wide array of creative projects fluctuates day to day and keeps designs interesting and fresh.
How has KeyShot helped save time, money or improve quality?
KeyShot has attributed to multiple time saving avenues to help the Golf Team make creative decisions faster and ultimately reduce cost. The examples listed below are specific to what the Golf Creative team has been able to improve upon using KeyShot.
Faster Product Design Decision Making:
With Keyshot, our creative team can align with marketing and R&D (Research & Development) to review new products in a virtual world. Product decisions can be made on screen to reduce the amount of samples required by our vendors. This eliminates the need for multiple samples being shipped overseas, which ultimately lowers costs and speeds up product development timelines.
Reduction in Product Photography:
Our Wilson Staff premium line of golf clubs is now entirely made through KeyShot. In KeyShot we are able to dictate art direction, lighting and composition of imagery for our global premium line. We have created hundreds of visual assets that are used in multiple creative avenues. This approach alone has reduced studio photography time, heavy re-touching fees and overseas product sample shipping costs.
More Creative Assets:
Since we have offered KeyShot in our group, we have been building more unique and innovative creative assets. These assets are used through multiple creative channels such as interactive 360 VR videos, product videos/commercials and in-store environmental design solutions.
What were some challenges KeyShot help overcome if any?
The largest hurdle that the Golf Creative team overcame was ability to produce product assets from CAD models without having physical samples to photograph. With delays on getting final product samples shipped to the US our team was already behind on creating assets for MarComm and Trade advertising. KeyShot helped us get past this challenge as we were able to create hundreds of assets for product that we had not seen final physical samples of.
What is one piece of advice you would pass along to other designers?
Keep pushing the limitations of the program. We use KeyShot in any instance that we can to create hyper real images and assets. Whether we are creating in-store environments or packaging renders, KeyShot has been instrumental in producing a superior solution for our clients.
