On Dec. 23, 2009, Canadian designer Don Watt passed away at the age of 73. He leaves behind a legacy of innovation, having fundamentally influenced some of the biggest brands in Canada and around the world, including Walmart, Loblaw, Home Depot and Filene's Basement.
In his early career, he worked as an animator for Warner Bros. and a cockpit designer for A.V. Roe, and in 1965 he contributed to the design of the ultimate icon, the Canadian flag.
He founded Don Watt + Associates in 1966, later called the Watt Group, which was sold to Cott Corporation in 1992. In 1999, he bought the company back through a partnership with Envoy Communications and renamed it Watt International. In 2003, Don and partner Geoff Belchetz broke off from Envoy to form DW+Partners.
Don revolutionized retail, changed the way we look at packaging and left a lasting impression on those who knew him and worked with him. In 2006, he was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Legends. A legend he truly was.

In his own words
The following is an excerpt from Watt’s yet-to-be-published book, tentatively titled Fast Forward: The Changing Face of Retail.

From the chapter titled “Moving Forward, Looking Back”:

There are times when trying to understand the events of the past helps to avoid present problems. Understanding conditions and their impact on decisions – and consequences – can save current management pain and suffering.  We have seen market turbulence and recession before and it is surprising how often events and mistakes are repeated. One example illustrates it best.
In 1976, French retailer Le Carrefour created “Les Produits Libres” – freedom products, free from the tyranny of the brands. While this seems a little melodramatic (I never felt personally tyrannized), it clarified an issue in French consumers’ minds. Packaged in simple white containers, with only large black descriptive copy communicating item differences, they became wildly successful in France. These were a response to the inflation/recession caused by OPEC’s re-pricing of oil in October 1973. 
Working in Switzerland at the time, I witnessed the success of this response and showed the ad and packaging to Dave Nichol, then running Loblaws in Ontario. He arranged a meeting for us with the chairman of Le Carrefour to understand why they had taken this direction.
The chairman was very open with us, as we were not competitors. He indicated that package simplification was largely symbolic, to illustrate savings without sacrificing product quality. In terms of visibility, they dominated in every category, overwhelming national brand entries throughout the store.
This point on product quality was not lost on Dave, and we returned from that meeting to develop the No Name line. Since yellow (the highest visibility colour) had been established as the colour of saving at Loblaws, we replaced white with yellow, using black and red typography to replace pictures of the products. This “anti-brand,” commodity image flew in the face of conventional wisdom, but recognized that packaging was actually part of the architecture. It served to differentiate the line from all other brands in the store. 
Brand equity was added back, with the president speaking to customers in their homes, through weekly print advertising and television messages. We had proposed using the president as the voice of the company, when Bill Shatner, the previous spokesman, became unavailable with new commitments in the U.S. Over the objections of the advertising agency, we undertook a media buy study, which saved millions by creating an internal unit.
Later we proposed using the president on TV, with messages produced by an internal production unit. This reduced commercial production costs from $100,000 to $600 each.
Television, the attitude-changing medium, was key in changing consumers’ perceptions of the business, but how to afford high production costs in an industry with razor-thin profit margins demanded re-thinking the process, if a sustainable differential was to be achieved. Other retailers in the U.S. and Canada responded to these pressures, with “value” offerings, but without maintaining quality. All eventually declined, as customers found them to fall short of expectations.
This is an old case. When I mention it today, managers think of it as an obsession with the past, not realizing that conditions today are frighteningly similar to those that triggered an earlier decade of trading down. Developing product programs that help consumers salvage their lifestyles, in the face of eroding disposable income, may be a way of maintaining some degree of stability in these uncertain times. Are we seeing an answer to this problem? Walk through your neighborhood store and see for yourself. Then look for alternatives, if you don’t find answers there.