Concept Design: Furry Pet Costumes 2016

So here are a few pet costumes I designed for PetSmart Halloween 2016. PetSmart was looking for furry creature costumes. That made me think of doing something similar to the way that Muppet-like monsters are made.

Original concept designs submitted for creating a trio of furry pet costumes for PetSmart Halloween 2016

This is an excellent example of how a product is actually created from design. Above you see my original concept art. It gives enough detail and specifics to create the items our client, PetSmart, is looking for. But as you will see below, the details are altered to reach the price point that the customer wants. So small details are eliminated, colors are modified, and the final product is usually a simplified version of the concept art.

Many designers I have worked with in the past, would take such changes personally because they'd get too personal with their work. That not the right frame of mind in this business. Your job as a designer is to bring forth ideas to help improve business and sales. If your design is too expensive to produce, at least you can provide the manufacturer enough details to work with - so that a final product can be created for the right price. It's far better to over design with more details to allow the manufacturing department to figure out how the item can be produced, shipped and sold.

I noticed these costumes weren't selling in many local PetSmart stores. These items looked great with these dog images, but PetSmart decided not to put these photos on the costumes' hangtags. Overall, these costumes looked like furry balls on hangers, which were hard to figure out how they'd look on dogs. It's a shame that they had these photos made for posters in front of the store, but decided to save a minuscule amount of money by not printing the hangtags with these same pictures. It would have been far more efficient and cost effective to do the hangtags with photos and simply drop the cost of the promotional posters in the storefront windows.