Congratulations! You’ve designed a spectacular product your customers are sure to love. Everything has been finalized and sent for manufacturing. Now it’s time to give it the finishing touch: Design packaging that will protect this innovative money-maker through transit and make a bold statement the moment a buyer lays eyes on it. Right?
It may not seem like it, but the situation above is the exact opposite of the right way to go about packaging. In this scenario, you’ve waited far too long to develop optimal packaging for your product. Even if you’re not relying on a gorgeous box that dazzles your customers by effectively communicating an irresistible value proposition, the right packaging can still make or break a successful product launch. Leaving this step to the last minute can even delay a launch if you run into unforeseen issues with packaging that fails to protect your product effectively.
The best way to ensure your product’s packaging complements its value, and never becomes a stumbling block to success, is to involve a packaging professional early in its lifecycle. Here’s what you can expect great packaging engineers to do throughout the process:
- Business opportunity assessment: It’s a wise idea to let your packaging team know as soon as you start exploring the potential opportunity for a new product. While you focus on early value propositions and strategic fit within your product portfolio, they can begin benchmarking the competitive landscape. This method provides ample time to analyze existing packaging strengths, weaknesses, and costs.
- Project definition and plan: Keeping your packaging engineer in the loop as you build a deeper understanding of product characteristics will help the packaging start to take shape, even at this early stage. The design team will begin developing concepts based on the initial voice of customer (VOC) product feedback. These preliminary designs incorporate packaging criteria advised by user experience desires, reuse capability or disposal requirements, product fragility data, cost constraints, and intended distribution/supply chain plan. Just like the product itself, packaging may not be final at this stage, but you’ll be able to share well-crafted packaging concepts with stakeholders alongside product samples.
- Product prototype validation: With product prototypes and packaging concepts in hand, bring along your packaging program manager to hear VOC feedback. End-user perspectives drive innovative packaging solutions just as they do product design, and this input will help your packaging team arrive at a final design while also considering cost, testing results, and operational compatibility. Your packaging engineers will use this time to gain a complete picture of what hazards your product is likely to encounter in the supply chain so he or she can devise a solution that protects it every step of the way without including more packaging than necessary.
- Product and market validation: Now that you have production samples of your product, it’s time to select a packaging design. Once that happens, your packaging team will conduct International Safe Transit Association (ISTA) or American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) trials to make sure it protects the product in the real world. They will also provide your marketing team with graphic guidelines, work with manufacturing stakeholders to solve any automation or ergonomic challenges with the packaging, document packaging specifications, identify material suppliers, and coordinate with them.
- Launch preparations: It’s the final countdown, and your packaging team will pull all the packaging details together just as you are doing for your product launch. Packaging engineers use this time to inspect and perform quality assurance (QA) on packaging samples at material supplier locations. They support labor activities at the end of each production line to work out the kinks and make final adjustments to ensure safety and efficiency. To sustain the gain, it is essential to train the end of line personnel on the intended use of the packaging design and application, so the new products stay secure on pallets throughout the extended supply chain. They can also step in and procure packaging and labeling elements if your company does not have a specific purchasing/procurement role.
- Post-launch product management: No matter how much you test, certain packaging situations may not present themselves until after launch. If you were diligent in involving packaging professionals from the beginning, these would most likely be small, but still, they’ll need addressing. You can lean on your packaging team to evaluate the cost of packaging in the face of accelerating volumes, increased breakage rates, and determine if changes are needed to reduce them. They’ll also be alert for user feedback and stay abreast of regulations that could necessitate changes.
For every step in the new product development process that packaging engineers are absent from, the risk of packaging delaying speed-to-market increases. It can even inhibit product success. In a worst-case scenario, shoddy packaging can lead to complete product failure. Take your packaging team along for the full product lifecycle ride and make sure your packaging does nothing but help propel your product to success.
Chainalytics understands that fresh package design will not only help to sell your products but can also surprise and delight customers as they receive your product well-presented and undamaged using environmentally sound packaging. Reach out to us and see how Chainalytics can make properly engineered packaging one of your new product’s greatest assets.
Nancy Matchey is the Vice President of Chainalytics’ Packaging Optimization practice, which delivers consulting services for today’s most complex packaging challenges across the supply chain.
