Arhaus Product handouts
Bringing the catalog into the showroom
I redesigned the product handouts Arhaus associates give to showroom customers so they matched the brand people knew from the catalog, then built them into a template system that scaled from one page to many.
The problem
Arhaus releases new products all the time, and each one needs a handout. When a customer in the showroom is interested in a piece, a store associate hands them a sheet with its specific details.
Customers met the Arhaus brand through its catalog, its website and the showroom itself. The creative director wanted the store to be an elevated experience of that brand. The handouts I inherited worked against it: everything for a collection was packed onto one page, text was set inconsistently, and the layout looked nothing like the catalog. Picking one up was a jarring break from everything else the customer had seen.
The files had a problem of their own. In preview the handouts looked finished, but inside InDesign frames were scattered across the page, items were placed by eye instead of grouped, and text was not tied to the image it described. Each new handout was hard to build and harder to update.
How it changed, in three phases
Fixing what existed (2020). I was brought on in February 2020 to make handouts, at first as a contractor. I kept the existing look but added consistent spacing, arranged the text properly, and rebuilt the InDesign files: grouping items, tying text to its image, and replacing hand-styled text with paragraph and character styles. When the pandemic hit, I was sent home; the creative director called me back personally, and we started the real redesign.
Redesigning from the ground up (2020 to 2021). Working back and forth with the creative director and the senior copywriter, I replaced the teal serif type with Helvetica and gave every element more room. The creative side of the marketing team was small then, so the work went back and forth between the three of us.
The final system (2021 to 2022). The last round kept the second design and added a large photo at the top of each handout showing the collection in a real room. Each handout now opened with a cover page, followed by product details and then the product and SKU pages.
Three decisions
Lead with the photography. Photography is at the center of the Arhaus brand. Photographers shoot background scenes on location, in places like Greece, then shoot each piece in the studio at very high resolution and place it into those scenes. Customers saw that work in the catalog and on the website, but the old handouts relied on small cutout product photos. Opening each handout with a large in-context photo brought the brand's strongest asset onto the one printed piece a customer took out of the store.
Match the catalog. The handouts took their type, Helvetica with the catalog's styling, and their thin rules directly from the catalog. Fabric and finish swatches were already familiar to customers from the catalog, so they stayed.
Fit the template to the content. Some products came in one design with a few finishes; others were collections with many pieces and configurations. With the creative director, I set which template to use based on how much product information there was: a single page, two pages, or a longer handout. The customer gets the story and the photos up front, and the associate finds the SKUs in a consistent format from one handout to the next.
The system
A full handout has a fixed order. The cover shows the collection in a room, with a headline, a short story about the product and a few detail photos. Next comes a product details page, usually with another photo in context. Then each product gets its own row: photo on the left; name, dimensions, finishes and SKUs on the right. Collections with many configurations end on a page of line drawings.
The same parts scale down. A single product with a few finishes fits on one page, and a large collection runs to five or more pages.
The rules also lived inside the files. Each template had paragraph styles and character styles for every kind of text, and a set amount of space between a product's photo and its text. A new handout started from an existing one: replace the photos and copy, adjust where the content needed it, and the type and spacing stayed consistent.
Special-order forms
Some handouts carried a special-order form on the back. The customer initials each term (cancellation, production time of up to 16 weeks, confirmed specifications, measured doorways) and signs, and the design consultant sends the form to the special-order team. I was in my UX master's coursework at the time and looked for ways to bring interactivity into print, so I built the forms in InDesign as PDFs that could be filled out on screen, with typed fields for the customer's name, order number and date, and finishes meant to be checked off.
Outcome
The system was used for new handouts until I left in December 2022. When a second designer joined, I walked her through the templates once; the styles and spacing in the files did the rest, and she produced new handouts in the same style using her own judgment. The design language also spread past handouts, into a dining handout covering table bases and other pieces, product guides, and other printed documents for customers and for internal use.
Looking back
Looking at these handouts now, I can see places where I compromised and did not apply the system as strictly as I designed it. In some spots I moved elements for variety, or because it looked nice, instead of following a rule. Today I would go further in setting standards and removing arbitrary choices, so every element has a purpose and the next designer has fewer decisions to make when updating a handout. The handouts still did what the creative director asked for: they made the printed piece in a customer’s hand look like the Arhaus they knew.