Before touching any material, we design. Every project that comes into Plastisart goes through a ...
Custom POS Display for Barilla From 3D design to retail shelves: a display project managed end-to-end by Plastisart
Making a product stand out in a retail aisle is a challenge many brands underestimate. Shoppers move fast. Shelves are crowded. In that saturated environment, a well-designed POS display can make all the difference between a product that gets noticed and one that sits unnoticed.
That's the context in which Barilla approached us to design and manufacture custom POS displays, intended to showcase their products at point of sale. A project that went well beyond simple manufacturing.
A clear brief, a brand challenge
From the first exchanges with Barilla's teams, expectations were precise: a visible, robust display, faithful to the brand's graphic identity, produced within deadlines compatible with the commercial calendar. No compromise on visual quality. No tolerance for colour approximations or finish inconsistencies.
This type of project is one we particularly enjoy at Plastisart. Not because it's simple, but because it brings together several of our skills simultaneously and delivers a tangible, visible result that the client's teams will find in stores.
3D design: laying the foundations before touching materials
As with all our projects, everything started in the design office. Working from Barilla's brief and visuals, we created a 3D model of the display to validate the geometry, proportions, assembly interfaces and shelf footprint.
This 3D design phase is not a formality. It's what allows us to identify problems upstream, structural weaknesses, misaligned angles, assembly issues, and correct them in the digital file before committing any material. Barilla was able to validate the final look on a 3D model before prototype launch.
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The prototype: validate before producing
A prototype was built before the production run. This is an essential step for this type of project: the display had to be tested in real conditions, positioned on a shelf, handled by the merchandising teams. A few adjustments were made after this test, a minor shelf height change, reinforcement of one assembly point. That's exactly what the prototype is for: correcting what you can't see on screen.
Once the prototype was approved, the manufacturing file was locked and the production run launched.
High Impact Polystyrene (HIPS): the right material for this project
The material chosen for the displays is High Impact Polystyrene, or HIPS. This was a deliberate choice.
HIPS offers an excellent balance between rigidity, lightness and ease of processing. It cuts cleanly, bends accurately under heat, and presents a smooth, consistent surface that works perfectly with high-definition digital printing. It's widely used in visual communication and POS applications for precisely these reasons.
Its lightness is also a logistical asset: displays are shipped flat and assembled on-site by the merchandising teams. A heavy display is expensive to ship and discourages installation.
CNC machining: precise cutting, piece after piece
The HIPS sheets were cut on our CNC machining centre. CNC guarantees repeatability: every piece is identical to the last, dimensions are maintained from batch to batch, and contours, even complex ones, are perfectly clean.
For a POS display, this cutting precision directly affects assembly: accurately cut pieces fit together without play, without force, without manual reworking. Assembly in-store by Barilla's teams had to be fast and intuitive. If pieces don't fit properly, that's a problem that surfaces in the field.
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High-definition digital printing: brand standards met
The visual dimension of this project was central. The display had to carry Barilla's graphic codes with complete fidelity: colours, typography, product visuals. No approximation was acceptable on this point.
The pieces were printed using high-definition digital printing directly on the HIPS. This technique achieves results close to professional print quality, with colour richness and sharpness that faithfully reproduce the brand's graphic charter. The result is a display that looks like what Barilla's marketing team envisioned, not an industrial approximation.
Hot bending for structural shapes
Some parts of the display required angular shapes, inclined panels, right-angle elements that give the display its structure and stability. These geometries were achieved by hot bending the HIPS sheets.
Hot bending involves locally heating the sheet along a defined fold line until it becomes malleable, then bending it to the desired angle before cooling. The result is a single-piece part, joint-free, whose rigidity comes from its geometry rather than added reinforcements.
Packaging and labelling to Barilla's specifications
Delivering a PLV project doesn't stop with the last piece produced. The displays were packaged according to Barilla's precise instructions: grouped by point of sale, individually labelled, with printed surfaces protected during transit. Each box shipped corresponded exactly to what a store needed to assemble its display.
End-to-end project, single point of contact
What defines this project is its complete ownership: 3D design, prototyping, material selection, CNC machining, digital printing, hot bending, packaging and labelling. From the first sketch to the last shipped box, everything was managed at Plastisart.
For Barilla, that meant one point of contact, one timeline, one accountability. A PLV project run like an industrial project, with the rigour that entails.
The result on the shelf
Barilla's displays were deployed in retail locations according to the commercial calendar. The brand was present, visible, consistent with its visual identity. Field teams reported fast, trouble-free installation.
That's what we aim for on this type of project: that no one notices the display as a plastic object, but everyone notices the product it showcases.
