Dubé Juggling

I've been working at Dubé as a creative since 2006. I started out scanning photos for a book project and moved up to graphic design. Eventually, I directed the whole design department. I worked with the company owner and marketing team to develop products, contribute to their design and preparation for manufacturing. When products were ready and tested I helped with their merchandising and marketing strategies online and in the Dubé retail space.

Responsibilities ranged from big to small and included; creating color schemes and picking patterns for products; packaging design; producing instruction sheets and demo videos; photographing and presenting products for print and web. I had comprehensive creative control down to designing the tape used to package customer's orders. It's the whole spectrum of conception to sale—or whatever it takes to get juggling equipment into the hands of performers. 

The owner of Dubé Juggling values printed products and I've designed numerous business cards, brochures, flyers, stickers and even the last printed Dubé catalog.

Before YouTube or the internet, jugglers had to learn skills from books, DVDs, or even VHS tapes. Dubé Juggling manages a short list of books and DVDs that teach and entertain. I helped to convert the old video VHS format to digital DVDs which included designing DVD menus and packaging. I also helped design and revise juggling books for print and EPUB.

Above: Ball Bounce Juggling and Hat Juggling DVD art by me, Art of Juggling cover by me. Illustrations are by Jason Booher-Jennings.

Juggling gets passed down the generations and appeals to the young. As a strategy for rewarding loyal customers and to advertise the brand to new customers I art directed a line of special edition shirts designed by illustrators and other designers. The shirts are still available in bright colors and were created to appeal to a juggler's sense of humor.

From Left to Right: the Playing with Food hamburger shirt is illustrated by me, the Club Does Not Equal Pin shirt was designed by Matt Guzzardo, the No Assembly Required shirt is designed by Daniel Brooks, the Jumbled Juggler shirt is designed by Harpreet Padam and finally, the incredible Nimbinis shirt is designed by Eric Terry.

Dubé Juggling is well known for its durable juggling club design and each club is assembled by hand in the Dubé workshop. This offers a unique opportunity to customize each part of the club. With this in mind, I worked with Dubé's very talented programmer to create a custom club decorator. Customers can visualize different color combinations before buying their equipment. The customizer model was reused throughout the Dubé website to allowing products such as cigar boxes, devil sticks, and hula hoops to be purchased in unique color combinations.

When the marketing team wanted to increase conversion and time spent on the Dubé website we came up with DubeTube, a reward program that allowed anyone to upload their personal juggling and performance videos. All customers received a 20% discount for their uploads and if the videos featured Dubé products we put them on the correlating web page as demos. 

The program was a triple crown win all around. The crowdsourced videos added content to the website which further visually informed shoppers about products, the DubeTube participants were more likely to shop again with their discounts, and Dubé was able to acquire new customers from YouTube where the videos were embedded. The Dubé team also had a lot of fun in the retail space shooting our own videos with the famous clowns and performers who would stop by to play. 

Dubé continued to embrace content creation and added a blog to the website that everyone in the office contributed to. Articles included posts like office and desk tours, decorating hacks, tips and  for guides jugglers,  reviews of juggling events, and April Fool's prank posts. With all the content the Dubé Twitter and Facebook audience grew and customers actively engaged with the company. 

Email is still a great place to connect with customers if you have a specific message. I created emails for Dubé's seasonal sales, new product releases, and important updates.