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I’m Caleb, a multidisciplinary graphic designer with a passion for art direction with eight years of experience across agency, corporate, and freelance settings. I believe that successful graphic design lives at the intersection between art and communication and aim for that point in my process.

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Caleb Peters

PMTA

An account of a massive interdepartmental scramble

2022

BRANDING & MARKETING

COLLAB W/ Leah Williams & Alberto Cabrera

In March of 2022, language was added to a federal omnibus spending bill that placed synthetic nicotine products under the purview of the FDA. Most of the vaping industry had recently switched from tobacco-derived nicotine to synthetic, and were now faced with the reality that they had only two options: to alter their products’ formulations, names, and supporting marketing materials and submit them again, or simply go out of business.

The Crisis

TO APPLY OR NOT TO APPLY

When the regulations changed, we were faced with a choice: go out of business, or drop everything and prepare to resubmit all 12 e-liquid product lines to the FDA. We chose the latter.

In order to qualify for submission and remain in compliance, every product line needed to be renamed and reformulated and new marketing materials needed to be created using the new names. All of that would then need to be bundled up alongside an application and sent to the FDA.

All of this had to be done within 28 days in order to meet the surprise deadline.

Getting Started

RENAMING AND RENDERING

The first 14 days was devoted to renaming and marketing. Every brand and each of their flavors needed to be changed, so we started by taking inventory of all of our brands and each of their flavors.

As each brand name was decided on, the lab began reformulating the product, and a fellow designer got to work on altering the packaging to reflect the new monikers.

When a packaging design was completed, they made their way to me so I could construct renderings for every brand’s flavors at every nicotine strength level, which came out to over 280 unique images.

These renderings were passed to a procurement team to add to our online catalogs and made available for sale. With this, we had met the first qualification: all products had been marketed prior to the deadline.

Proposed Direction

HOW TO GET IT ALL DONE

With the renderings complete, the products online, and 14 days until the final deadline, the real work began. Each brand needed various pieces of collateral marketing material to be included in their applications, and each piece had to contain clear descriptions of every flavor in the line.

Each brand offered somewhere between two and eighty flavors. If this was going to get done in two weeks, I was going to have to create predetermined layout templates and use them as each piece's backbone, and they would need to be adaptable enough to account for the wide range of flavor offerings.

3-Flavor Layout

6-Flavor Layout

4-Flavor Alternative Layout

I developed wireframes configured for each quantity of flavors up to six, with two alternates for four- and five-flavor brands for variety. The eight, ten, and 80+ layouts were too much of a blocker to tackle at the front of the project; I intended to brainstorm solutions for numbers that large while I worked on the other brands.

Execution

PAINTING THE SKELETONS

Once these layouts were approved, it was time for me to start painting the branding onto them, using the provided packaging designs as a visual base.

With the proper colors, typography, product imagery, and aesthetic applied to them, these bare-bones templates quickly turned into solid designs.

Preparing for Applications

PRINT & DIGITAL

To meet the filing criteria, the application had to be accompanied by at least one piece of digital marketing and at least one piece of printed matter.

Luckily, I had kept this in mind when I was developing the templates—I made sure the hierarchical proportions of the type would be readable in multiple environments. Each design functioned as a 5x7” rack card by default, and by removing the nicotine warning and dropping it into an email campaign template, it would meet the criteria for a piece of digital marketing and still be readable.

Wrapping Up

THE POWER OF TEAMWORK

In the end, all the pieces of this effort came together in time to meet the final deadline. Regardless of whether the PMTA regulations were enforced, we had our bases covered now. In total, we rebranded 13 product lines and renamed, repackaged, and created renderings for over 220 product variations across them.

Looking back, I feel as though the odds of this project unfolding as it did were rather low. Every single department in the company was involved in one way or another, and our marketing department was burned with most of it. With the number of approvals involved and the sheer amount of content created, it could have easily taken months.

Additional time could have made each application far more polished, sure. More time could have been spent developing each brand, but something about the urgency of it all compelled us to produce decently successful work without panicking. By systematizing the process at the beginning, we eliminated a massive amount of headache that likely would have come up.

Ultimately, this project serves as an example of what a good team can create so long as communication is open and ongoing.