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Off the Shelf

Santa Ana-based Display Boys is hired to turn grocery store staples into supermarket chic.

The maker of store displays works with Kraft Foods Inc., Campbell Soup Co. and others to get their products to stand out on a crowded grocery store aisle.

“Everyone wants to be premium,” said Darin Rasmussen, president and cofounder of Display Boys.

The company got its start 20 years ago making displays for the surfwear industry.

Anaheim-based Pacific Sunwear of California Inc. is a current surfwear customer.

Now Display Boys also does store displays for cheese and crackers, sneakers, cookies, drinks and even Mattel Inc.’s Barbie.

Other customers include Starbucks Corp., Nestl & #233; SA’s U.S. arm and Nike Inc.

Display Boys does $20 million in yearly sales designing and producing store displays. It has about 40 workers and sales offices in Connecticut and Chicago.

For Kraft Foods, Display Boys is giving the company’s cheese and crackers a lift, designing a showier display to go alongside wine.

“We tackle function first,” Rasmussen said. “Then we add as much of the cool factor as possible.”

Pepperidge Farm Inc., part of Campbell Soup, called on Display Boys to upgrade its old wire shelving for cookies, breads and snacks.

Display Boys came up with a display that has a Maple wood backdrop that holds several shelves of cookies.

So far, Display Boys has placed 3,000 of the displays in grocery stores.

“They (Display Boys) think of the beauty of the structure itself,” said Susan Bell, director of in-store marketing for Pepperidge Farm.

Bell joined Pepperidge Farm about 18 months ago and was charged with reinventing package design and store displays.

Pepperidge Farm markets itself as a high-end brand, yet the cookie maker’s shelving was anything but, she said.

Display Boys usually is hired by consumer products companies and then ends up working with grocery stores and other retailers.

Ultimately, stores have to approve whatever Display Boys come up with.

Kraft might push new shelves on, say, the coffee aisle, and then get the rest of the brands to chip in on the new display.

“The retailer, at the end of the day, usually doesn’t pay for anything,” Rasmussen said.

For retailers, displays are like the dust cover of a book. They are meant to entice shoppers to pick up a product, explore it and buy it.

“You want people to spend more time at the shelf,” Rasmussen said.

Display Boys wins work based on design. It has about 12 designers and engineers.

But where the company makes money is from producing thousands of shelves or displays.

“What we win is a manufacturing job,” Rasmussen said.

The shelves and displays are made by contractors overseas and assembled and shipped from Santa Ana. The company also oversees installation.

Competitors include RTC Industries Inc. of Rolling Meadows, Ill., Atlanta-based Miller Zell Inc. and Colombus, Ohio-based Big Red Rooster, which are design agencies that contract out display manufacturing.

Rasmussen and John Riley, Display Boys’ cofounder and vice president, started in the 1980s working for Quiksilver Inc., where they made displays, just as surfwear was starting to take off.

Quiksilver set up prominent displays,sort of a store within a store,making use of props and heavy graphics, Rasmussen said.

“You feel that lifestyle,” he said.

Making everyday products stand out is more challenging.

Display Boys now does a lot of work in grocery stores, spicing up the center sections where bread and coffee are.

Grocery stores have done a great job on the perimeter,the deli, bakery and seafood sections. But it’s the center of the store where the bulk of the sales are made, Rasmussen said.

Display Boys is installing a new coffee aisle in 300 Kroger Co. stores.

“We’re trying to get the cafe feel in the coffee aisle,” Rasmussen said.

Kroger and other grocery chains are good clients because they need displays for thousands of stores, he said.

“As a manufacturer we don’t want to build a hundred displays. We want to build thousands,” Rasmussen said.

Grocery stores also are less impacted by a down economy. Clothing retailers, which are among the hardest hit in the economic slowdown, may put display spending on hold. Big grocery stores need to maintain their profiles or lose market share.

“In tough economic times the battle for the dollar is even that much more difficult,” Ras-mussen said.

Chains such as Pleasanton-based Safeway Inc., parent of Vons Cos., and Cincinnati-based Kroger, owner of Ralphs Grocery Co. and other grocery stores, face stepped up competition from stores by Trader Joe’s Co. and Whole Foods Market Inc.

“They’ve got open arms for our line of thinking,” Rasmussen said.

Display Boys also is in talks with drugstores to help them redo their food aisles. Grocery stores have integrated pharmacies within their stores, prompting drugstores to do the same with grocery items, according to Rasmussen.

“It’s a huge profit center they’ve not yet tapped into,” he said. “We would make that shopping experience so that it feels like it’s OK to buy your food at the drugstore.”

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