We are having so much fun playing with these Mungi Bands – we can only imagine how much kids are going to love them! This summer a client came to us with a simple, but brilliant idea- he wanted to create a toy/bracelet, similar to the popular synthetic bands, but with a big defining factor- a magnet.  The idea is for kids to collect and trade the different styles and colored bands to make their own design. Our client tested this new product concept first with his own children, and after getting rave reviews, he knew he was on to something! A few weeks later, he contacted Sage Island to help get this product off the ground, in which we took him through a series of phases to further develop branding, identity, design and packaging.

First our graphic artists were tasked with the logo creation. Our design team had a blast creating the Mungi Bands brand. The goal was to create a simple, fun logo that appealed to the children’s toy market and incorporated the magnetic theme. We explored multiple styles, shapes, and colors before we all decided on the chosen logo: A unique style of lettering that plays up the “U” in Mungi, and includes the magnets as eyes to create a smiley, kid friendly mark.

After working out the logo and the “Collect and Connect” trademarked tagline, we then moved into package design and development. Our team skillfully plotted the best way to package these fun bands. From deciding on quantity per package, shape, store placement angles, and finally the package design-we are thrilled with the end result.

We had a great time working on this project. It’s fun to take someone’s bright eyed idea and turn it into a reality. Now, Mungi Bands have over 22 unique designs and colors encouraging kids to collect, trade, share and play with the different styles! They are debuting their product this Saturday at both Wilmington Learning Express locations (10am-12 at the Hanover Center Location and 1-3pm at the Military Cutoff Location).  We encourage you to stop by to pick up these perfect Christmas stocking stuffers, and get in early on this trend!

We have partnered with the Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina this holiday season to raise awareness and donations for those at risk of hunger in our area. This organization has been providing food for people  in 34 counties in central and eastern North Carolina for over 30 years.

We are counting on the power of social media to help us do it!  Help spread the word by sharing this blog post, our Facebook Event, or Tweeting about it with the hashtag #SageIslandFoodBank. We have a drop box in our office and welcome financial donations as well in the form of checks made out to: Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina.  For every five items you bring or $5 you donate, you are entered into our raffle for the chance to win a sweet prize. We will be posting updates and more information on the Sage Island Facebook Page.

Check out these print graphics we did a few weeks ago for MCO Transport! They needed a quick turn-around for graphics for an upcoming trade show and we delivered! What do you think? They all nicely match the look and feel of the recently revamped website.

Retractable Banner:

Print Brochure:

With one of the largest online fan communities, One Tree Hill has grown immensely in popularity over the years and it’s all filmed right outside our office doors! As Wilmingtonians, we have been lucky to see the actors and scenes being filmed around our town for years. Over the past nine seasons they have accumulated thousands of pieces for their sets and wardrobes, which is all being made available to purchase at their much anticipated Wrap Sale.

Sage Island was lucky enough to work  with the great people over at Auction Co. of Wilmington and the team at One Tree Hill for this job. Tasked with designing and building a website that mirrors the One Tree Hill brand and showcases the vast amount of items for sale, we were excited to get to work. The new website is built in WordPress, which integrates perfectly with their Flickr photo albums containing THOUSANDS of photos of the items being auctioned off on December 9-11. With over 5 million fans on Facebook, One Tree Hill supporters are anxiously awaiting the Wrap Sale and we know will be visiting the website for a sneak peak. That being said,the website needed to be able to handle the large amount of traffic, which our hosting department gladly took care of!

We have so enjoyed working with this One Tree Hill project, the perfect send off to the production that has been in our backyard for so many years. We are looking forward to attending the Wardrobe Sale and Auction ourselves!

What does a site ‘reskin’, database driven product display, part number converter, engaging social news tool (blog), tradeshow graphic and a catalog revamp all have in common? Well…LinkTech of course!

Being a long time customer of Sage Island, over the years LinkTech has sought out our design services for both the website and print pieces, as well as our custom programming and internet marketing services. As each year unfolds, we are honored to work with the team at LinkTech to constantly update the website and marketing materials, and proudly this year we took a big step and made some major changes across the board:

Site Reskin:
It was time for a new look! Keeping in line with existing branding, our team came up with a new design that softens the color palette of LinkTech and modernizes the overall look, while not drastically changing the brand recognition.

Database Driven Product Display/Part Number Converter:
When the site first launched a couple years ago, each product was manually entered into the website, which was perfect for then—but over the years LinkTech has expanded products due to rapid growth of new customer orders (read more here on this growth) and therefore needed a simpler solution in keeping products updated on the website and therefore we custom programmed a database for product display.

With all that data already in a database, we then took it a step further and programmed a Part Number Converter where you can enter the competitor’s part number and it will display the LinkTech’s compatible part. You can test it out by entering the competitor’s part: PMC1002.

Engaging Social News Tool (Blog):
With so many changes taking place in LinkTech, we all determined it was time to promote, boast and spread the great news and to do so we created a blog. This blog feeds up to 5 of the latest post to the home page of the website and is skinned to visually match the look and feel of the website for a seamless transition from website to blog platforms.

Tradeshow Graphic:
To gear up for the tradeshows, we created a banner stand that parallels the site and catalog’s new look and feel.

Catalog Revamp:
The 2011 revamp of the catalog was a biggie including a ton of new products, new cover and new technical pages for each product series. The catalog grew from 19 pages to 36!

We were excited when long-time customer The North Face Breckenridge (Breck Gear) came to us for guidance in social media marketing! As you know, there are a number of Social Marketing tools one can use to reach out to potential product buyers around the United States. Our end goal for Breck Gear was to help increase qualified traffic to the company website through social media tools. By exploring this new marketing opportunity for them, we ultimately helped them reach a broader audience through the use of two simple, yet powerful social tools: WordPress Blog and Facebook.

WordPress Blog:
Breck Gear already had a blog through Blogger in which they frequently updated content, which was awesome, but it was completely hidden and not accessible from the website; it was also at a third party domain rather than the site domain. By being so hidden, this already established blog wasn’t giving Breck Gear a chance to showcase their posts. Our suggestion here was to build a link between the blog and website (as shown in the navigation on the site), reskin the blog in WordPress (to have the blog match the look and feel of the site) and build the blog under a directory in the domain (to ultimately give the site’s domain ‘credit’ for all that blog content).

Facebook:
Here, again, Breck Gear was a step ahead and already had a Facebook page, but we had a few suggestions for improvement. First and foremost, we suggested adjusting the account name from ‘Breck Gear’, to ‘The North Face Breckenridge’ to allow us to capitalize on the North Face association. We then suggested a creative landing page and efforts to get at least 25 ‘likes’ in order to create a vanity URL for the page.

Since our suggestions on the blog and Facebook page, Breck Gear has really taken off and are currently working on building out the photo gallery, adding videos and linking posts from the blog to the Facebook page. In the future, once they have a solid following/community, they can have fun creating a Facebook campaign or contest. I encourage everyone to check out their new blog and Facebook page and leave a comment!