Some products seem to have always been packaged in a certain way. It’s hard to imagine buying a new pair of shoes without them coming in a cardboard box or picking up milk that isn’t in a bottle or carton. There’s an element of ‘if it’s not broke, then don’t fix it’ to these packaging conventions. These shape and structural choices are often efficient and practical when it comes to protecting, transporting and storing the specific product. However, the downside of established design principles is that they can become restrictive. Brands and packaging designers often default to what is expected of them which can stifle creativity and improvement. But now with new innovations in both material and product design, some brands are breaking away from these long-held conventions and reinventing familiar packaging.
No more shoeboxes
Sustainable shoe company Ales Grey recently partnered with material company Sway to do away with the cardboard shoe box. Although standard shoe boxes are recyclable, they are often transported in a second box for protection which makes for double the waste, as well as increased weight.
Sway has helped Ales Grey replace all of that cardboard by packaging the shoes in a compostable pouch that is made of seaweed. The packaging is visually arresting and allows consumers to see the packaged shoes, as well as protecting them against marks.
Material developments like this allow brands to be more inventive with their packaging design and to literally ‘think outside the box’.
Shifting to sheet format
In a similar vein, newly launched German brand Mililk is reimagining the way that plant milk is packaged. It is doing away with cartons by printing oats into a solid sheet format. The customer simply adds the sheet to a blender with water to create barista quality oat milk. This gives the consumer control over how much milk they want to make – depending on how much of a sheet they use – which reduces potential food waste.
It also means that 10 litres worth of oat milk can be shipped within a single package, which can fit through a letterbox and takes up less in-home storage space. Removing the water means most of the weight involved in shipping the product is removed, reducing the environmental impact.
Persil is also trialling a shift to a sheet format in a bid to cut down the amount of water shipped in its products. Laundry detergent typically comes in a liquid or gel format and requires a container made out of a material like plastic to transport it.
The brand’s new Laundry Detergent Sheets dissolve within the washing machine to provide the same cleaning performance without the need for additional water. This means the packaging can be changed to be smaller, lighter and made of more sustainable materials.
In the UK, the Laundry Detergent Sheets launched exclusively on Amazon, which makes sense given that the lighter water-free option is an ideal fit for e-commerce.
As innovative companies disrupt the way we think about certain goods, such as the removal of water, the opportunity to change how we package everyday items increases.
By Jack Stratten, Head of Trends at retail trends agency Insider Trends.
