As the packaging and displays that designers create move downstream toward the store shelf, they are increasingly stopping off at a contract packager's facility for pack-out.
Brand owners are turning to co-packers with increasing frequency to assemble multipacks and kits, and to build point-of-purchase and pallet displays. Brand-owner thinking today is to shift the "packaging department" outside their walls so they can focus on creating and marketing products.
Though this approach can get products into stores with lightning speed and some cost-efficiencies, there are challenges, too. And that's where design comes in. Listen to Joe Jaruszewski, who believes that designers don't communicate with co-packers early enough or often enough, and it's unnecessarily costing brand owners money.
Jaruszewski is President of Market Resource Packaging, a contract packager that handles hundreds of primary, secondary, and display packaging jobs each month for customers from Victoria's Secret to Johnson & Johnson to Pfizer. I recently visited his sprawling plant in Cranbury, NJ.
Designers, Jaruszewski says, pay too little attention to the impact of their work as their packages move downstream into operations, warehousing, and distribution. Jaruszewski sees examples with astonishing frequency of packaging that creates downstream problems which are easily avoided.
"For example, you're designing for 4,000 pallet displays of Listerine. If you can't stack them, you're going to have a facilities-need issue and cost your company money," he says. "You may have to spend a little more on the display to make it sturdier. These are things that are not always apparent on a designer's desk."
Or consider that your choice of board to get just the right visual branding effect might be ideal graphically speaking, but it also might wilt structurally in the extremely humid air of a co-packing facility in Dallas, TX. Such considerations might be lost on a designer who's creating in the chill of a New York City or Chicago spring.
"Call that co-packer and don't assume anything," Jaruszewski advises. What Jaruszewski means is that good design goes beyond on-brand graphics and effective colors and shapes. A good package has to be pleasing to look at and hold, and also has to function structurally.
Mistakes made in the creative phase might not affect a designer's budget directly, but they certainly impact the company's bottom line when damaged or ruined packages and displays are returned. Future consequences of lost revenue could include tighter design budgets.
Jim George, Editor
