New Packaging for Famous Chicken

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This year, the Stone Ward team worked hard to revamp the packaging designs for Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken: taking into account considerations from several audiences, Stone Ward helped the brand land on a cohesive design that would launch them into the next phase of its already long-standing success.

Starting with research, the team looked into not only direct competitors’ brands, but also those from out of category competitors, all to determine fast food’s recent design trends and investigate which brands have seen recent growth and success. From this research, we landed with some best practices for Lee’s packaging: colorful designs that use a bold brand logo and include a unique, prominent value proposition.

We worked hard to ensure that everything the customer experiences, from the point-of-purchase items at the counter, to the item packaging, to advertisements, to online media including the Lee’s website and social media, all matched seamlessly. We designed a new “wallpaper” that’s used on everything that uses the “Famous for” type treatment, highlighting that Lee’s is Famous for chicken, homestyle, flavor and more. We also sought to feature the brand’s unique value proposition, ensuring that all pieces work cohesively together to communicate: “Fresh, hand-breaded, honey-dipped and pressure cooked to perfection.” This differentiating message for Lee’s was worth the real estate in the new design.

Several other factors played into the development of this design. We took into account the cost of color printing and the huge quantity of these that needed to be developed to place in every store with enough inventory to last another three to six years, in order to land on this design that uses more white space and has more longevity. We also factored in one small run 50th anniversary cup (pictured below) for use in stores for the duration of this year only.