Steering the product life cycle: a premium launch to open a phase-out

Four settings chosen by the regional teams

The campaign covers four sectors, and none of them was settled at head office. Construction was chosen by European marketing, mining by the Australian team, oil and gas for the American market. Each region named the setting it judged most promising for this range, with welding rounding out the coverage of uses.

This way of deciding takes up the one used on the Platinum campaign the previous year, where each sales region had already named its priority setting in order to concentrate an insufficient budget. Here it produces more than a budget compromise. The product name announces universality: showing four genuinely different environments, each defended by the regional team that chose it, demonstrates the promise instead of asserting it. The segmentation becomes the argument.

The diptych, world and adventurer

Each sector is handled by a pair of images rather than a single one. One visual carries the environment and the product, the other carries the person wearing it.

That doubling comes from extending the art direction to the packshots. Rather than letting campaign visuals sit on one side and catalog packshots on the other, I produced hero packshots set inside the campaign's own visual world, alongside the traditional packshots. The product stops being cut out on a neutral background next to a story it does not belong to.

Finding the right level of hyperbole

The position taken was to depict the workers as adventurers, in a deliberately heightened world. Unlike the Platinum campaign, where moving from the register of risk to that of empowerment had met resistance from the European sales teams, the positioning decision raised no difficulty here: the rebranding had made empowerment official, and previous successes had given me a standing with the regional teams that I did not have the year before.

The difficulty moved to the writing, at a more delicate point. Hyperbole has to be visible enough for the reader to catch the game, otherwise it reads as pretension. But it must never tip into irony or condescension, or the person it stages becomes a character to be smiled at. Yet the underlying point is the opposite: genuine respect for demanding trades. So the calibration was done sentence by sentence, along that precise line.

Building the sets you cannot rent

The production budget was complete this time, which made shooting on location possible. One exception, the American oil operation, with no accessible equivalent for a shoot in France.

The EO Production team came fully into their own here, in location scouting and set dressing where every scene was solved by economical assembly rather than by spending. A cave in the Ardèche stood in for the mine, lit by four fixtures arranged to reproduce the light of a massive machine. Sections of pipeline and valves were built in PVC and polystyrene to hold the foreground of the oil world, the rest being shot on green screen with a stock plate composited behind.

That financial pragmatism applied to every staging is not a production detail. It determines what a concept can afford: deciding where the money has to go, and where a fabricated solution does the same job as a rental, is the condition for ambition to survive the quote.

Passing through the goggle and through the pupil

Continuity between the four worlds was built upstream, in the shot list. The sequence shots were worked out precisely to guarantee smooth transitions, and the mechanism for moving from one scene to the next was designed as a crossing: the camera passes through the goggle, then through the pupil.

This device introduces a figure the MY6 campaign would take up a few months later, in a lighter form: passing through the eye as a narrative door. It is more technically demanding from the outset, because the goggle sits between the camera and the pupil. The solution was to **remove the goggle lens during the shoot**, to eliminate stray reflections and focus problems, then recreate it in post. An HDRI was captured on location so that the synthetic lighting would match the set exactly.

I then signed off the 3D work against my storyboards, looking for the best possible match in the morph between the graphic treatment of the iris and the appearance of the cosmic worlds. A transition of this kind only holds if the tipping point is prepared at the shoot: decided in post, it always shows.

What the frozen packshots cost

The product world visuals are photomontages built from physical packshots. At that point I did not yet have a 3D compositing workflow.

That limitation weighed more than I had expected. The packshots arrived late in the process, we had to move fast, and working from frozen images severely restricts what is possible: an angle nobody planned for cannot be recovered, a light that does not match has to be lived with. The result holds, but it was obtained against the method rather than through it.

It is precisely that frustration which set off my work on the 3D packshot pipeline, a system that generates product images directly from technical data, with no studio and no shoot, and which has a study of its own. What I was after there were three things this project had denied me: producing before the golden samples arrive, having freedom over framing and lighting, and obtaining more accomplished visuals.

The color code as the only visible difference

The range is built on a strict color convention: yellow for the ventilated version, green for the sealed one, gray for neoprene, black for the welding version, with the lens tint coming after that. None of those differences is technically legible in a campaign image.

The choice was therefore not to attempt to explain them, and to have the visuals carry the diversity of uses rather than that of references. Technical explanation came later, once the 3D pipeline was in place, in the form of exploded views highlighting the characteristics of each version for technical and conversion material. Separating those two arguments avoided the classic flaw of the product campaign, where you try to inspire and explain within the same image and fail at both.

A campaign in the service of a phase-out

The initial campaign is a pure awareness campaign. It was followed by trade marketing assets designed to support the commercial transition, which was its real purpose.

The two objectives coexisted without merging. Facing the market, the point was to announce a launch and install a premium positioning, an icon of Bollé Safety expertise. Internally, the point was to open the gradual replacement of the whole goggles range, completed six months later by a mid-range model and an entry-level product.

That product development served a third objective, less visible and more lasting: it was the opportunity to apply the new brand codes to product design itself. So the campaign will have supported a margin operation, a catalog refresh and the anchoring of an identity, without any of those three layers appearing to whoever reads a poster.