August 30, 2024
Imagine yourself relaxing on a beach. The warm ocean breeze leaves you feeling a little parched, so you reach into the cooler at your side for a refreshing beverage. As your hand slides into the cooler, you realize your entire day’s worth of ice has become nothing but a lukewarm puddle, leaving your drinks quite the opposite of refreshing.
Since you plan to be in the sun all day, you decide to reapply sunscreen to protect your skin. After a couple of sprays, you notice not as much sunscreen is being dispensed as it should. The strange thing is, the relatively new bottle was at least half full the last time you checked. Upon further inspection, you notice the tube that runs into the lotion is not long enough to get to the bottom quarter of the bottle. Great. No beverage and no sunscreen. As a last resort, you pull out a brand-new beach umbrella to protect yourself from the intense sunrays. Now that it’s up, you can finally return to what you started trying to do—relax, breathe in the fresh air, and close your eyes.
All of a sudden, the soothing darkness that was the inside of your eyelids turns to a reddish-yellow, semiblinding wall of light trying to invade your tranquility. You reluctantly open your eyes, only to find that your so-called “quality beach umbrella” couldn’t handle a gust of wind and had completely folded inside out, ripping the nylon cloth blocking the beams, and is now rendered useless. How did this carefree day in the sun turn so quickly into a less-than-ideal situation, and could something have been done to prevent these mishaps altogether? This is where prototyping and design come into play, and why it is critical to ensure the package successfully complements the product, to design with the customer in mind, and to ensure structural integrity is at the forefront of testing and decision-making.
Before I continue, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Maxwell Williams, and I’m a senior at Clemson University studying packaging science and brand communication. This summer, I have the pleasure of interning for the Packaging School. The reason I opened with a rather irritating situation is to put a spotlight on the way packaging impacts our lives without us noticing—until it’s inconvenient. One of the main principles for packaging is to provide convenience to the user; this is what makes a standard package that much more successful.
That said, we need to know how the initial design will perform and if it’s worth being put into production. The best way to come to these business-building decisions is to prototype. In our cooler example, the failure point of this package system was designing without any thought of the user or enough testing to see that the cooler would not last a full day at the beach. If it can’t successfully keep drinks cold or ice frozen on a hot, sandy beach, the cooler is not worth your dollar. This is a prime example of a package not performing the task it was designed to accomplish.
An equal, if not greater, mistake was made with the sunscreen packaging—not recognizing that the length of the dispensing tube does not fit the bottle in a way that allows the consumer to use all of the sunscreen. This poses a multitude of problems. For one, some of the sunscreen is left in the container. Not only is this a waste of the time, energy, and money put into the production and transportation of the products, but they also leave a negative impression on the customer. Yes, the consumer could simply unscrew the lid and use the remaining sunscreen without the spray feature. But this plays against the role of convenience through packaging and adds a burden to the consumer that could have simply been caught during a testing and prototyping phase.
The last example from our mishap-filled beach day is more product-related; however, the same principle applies to packaging. A new beach umbrella should withstand the natural elements in much the same way as a parcel being delivered to your doorstep should withstand the rigors of distribution. Should damage occur to such a degree that the consumer’s interaction with the product is impacted, especially in an environment where the elements encountered are expected, the result (not just an unhappy customer) includes negative environmental effects and a failure to reach sustainability goals. Much like what will happen with the now broken umbrella, a best-case scenario for a damaged-upon-delivery product is an immediate return and possible reorder. This translates into more fossil fuel emissions, more energy usage, more costs for either party, more time focusing on what should have been done the first time, and less satisfaction all around. This is why utilizing the correct packaging components to ensure structural integrity is essential for a positive customer interaction and for business and environmental sustainability.
The ideas just discussed are, of course, not only related to coolers, sunscreen, and umbrellas, or even limited to the plastic, textile, or metal industries. These concepts are integral to every person or company with a product to sell or an experience to provide. In my personal endeavors, I look to exercise these principles whenever I get the chance, specifically in the annual 48HR REPACK competition. A few of my peers and I spend a weekend completely redesigning a package on the market. To be successful in the competition, we must think about how we can improve upon what already exists; consider the person using and interacting with the package; appeal to our target audience; and most importantly, build a professional, working package that demonstrates our thought process. A recurring theme during our weekend redesign, no matter how much we love an idea, is a willingness to make a change if our package is not feasible in all aspects of the prototyping phase.
Maxwell Williams is a senior at Clemson University studying packaging science and brand communications. He is also an intern at the Packaging School.
Alli Keigley, who contributed to this article, is production coordinator at the Packaging School.
She can be reached at alli@packagingschool.com.
