Packaging Podcast

What do you need to include in a packaging design proposal? We discuss the dicovery phase of your packaging proposal in this episode, everything that is required and everything you need to consider before sharing with a potential packaging design client.

How to consider timelines, budgets, quantities, and create a visual language for your client to communicate with you regarding their design desires. Packaging design requires many considerations and the tighter the parameters you set up for your packaging design project, the better your design will be.

Listen and drop us a line with any thoughts, questions, or anything you'd like to learn more about.

How do you design packaging? Before you can design packaging you need to have a usable dieline and template. This episode explains how to easily create a packaging dieline without the need for expensive software. 

It's so easy that you can actually create professional templates from your phone and have the files in seconds. 

Packaging Designers looking for new materials are inundated with new technologies and materials with fantastic claims. But what happens to these materials when the infrastructure doesn't exist to process them and make those claims a reality? Find out how to consider the materials you choose and ask the questions that matter.

Find out more about compostable plastics.

Packaging Design is a key part of viral brands, brands that launch online with no brick and mortar and scale quickly due to demand, limited edition drops, and a great product. Last Crumb is just that brand!

Last Crumb launched with beautiful product photography and an irreverent attitude, quickly selling out of their cookie drops weekly. Packaging is the only physical contact anyone will have with the brand besides the cookies, so the packaging has to be perfect.

After unboxing the Last Crumb cookie packaging, I share what works what doesn't and how I would consider making edits.

If you're a packaging designer and love cookies, you gotta listen.

If you're a startup and want your packaging to build your brand beyond protecting your product, you need to listen.

How do you design packaging for end of life? You begin at the end and back into the design that delivers the most sustainable solution for each brand. Let's understand why Design Matters as well as why asking the right questions are as important as creating a clear sustainable packaging communication strategy is not just clever, but necessary.

Packaging designer Evelio Mattos shares his experiences working with brands ranging from start-ups to global brands over 15 years, and how he continues to innovate and educate. 

How do you select a packaging material for your packaging design? 

You get the facts and ask questions.

In this episode we discuss how certain materials may be recyclable in their country of origin but not necessarily recyclable in their country of deplyment. 

Unknowingly selecting materials delivers packaging that is not desired by the local recycling centers and weakens the brand's sustainability story.

Our first listener question!!

Ok, so how do you bring value to a brand when you sell packaging? Focus on the brand's biggest pain points not your packaging. How is their packaging being fulfilled? Is it an automated process, in-line, semi-automated, find out and understand that process to learn the fillers biggest pain points. Speak to the packaging distributor or the product distributor and find their biggest pain points!

It's all about uncovering everyone's pain points at different phases of the supply chain, then determining the way you can solve the top three pain points. It may actually mean you sell less packaging sometimes, but that's a good partner. Focus on them first, and selling packaging second. 

You'll develop a great relationship and reputation in the industry and soon your client list will grow beyond your own thoughts.

How do you compete on shelf? Follow the old saying, all is fair in love and war.

On shelf competition is a war, it's a battle, and the unboxing process is a matter of making the consumer fall in love with the experience. 

Packaging design without either of these fails on several key brand building moments, listen to how different brands approach this concept. 

Apply these lessons to your packaging design process today!

Developing Innovative Packaging concepts

• Limitless possibilities of kick-off
• Harsh realities of manufacturing
• Soul-crushing budgetary constraints
• Creativity sucking timelines
• Currently I’m early in the limitless possibilities stage of a project and wanted to talk about how I’m feeling because I can’t imagine I’m the only one that goes through these ups and downs.

I love the project, one the brand, love how bluesky everything is at this stage.

At this stage I can take the red pill or the blue pill:

RED pill: I can design bluesky packaging that isn’t based in reality and takes into account manufacture, budgets, timelines and all of those parameters and deliver something the client will fall in love with instantly…

Or the Blue Pill, I can design something that pushes the bounds of the parameters we’re locked into because of manufacturing, budgets, timelines and everything else that compresses your creativity.

Here’s why I wanted to talk, because at this stage I don’t do either.

I actually don’t do anything at all.

I have ideas that roam between 1 and 2 running through my mind

I see the potential and fall in love with an idea, but I also see the limitations which deflate the concepts

But what I don’t do is I don’t begin to sketch or create anything tangible.

WHY? Because I am afraid. I am so afraid that my concepts won’t work when I put them down on paper, I worry that I will sketch them out and see their flaws of how they won’t be able to be produced because of a particular fold, material, position, whatever.

And this fear is paralyzing. I mean I can’t get myself to get started on paper.

It’s a 48 hour process that I go through each and almost every time I work on a big project. Small ones no fear, big ones, lots of doubt.

After 48 hours I make myself sit down and begin sketching out concepts whether it’s what I had in mind or some lateral idea that will get me to where I want to go.

I have a conversation with myself about how these bluesy ideas will make the client love me and I settle on only delivering what is possible within the specified parameters. But ultimately I never take either the red pill or the blue pill. I take them both.

I allow myself the freedom to sketch beyond the parameters but through the lens of what is possible. What can we push past, a concept that may take a little more budget, or take a little more time, something that may deliver an unexpected unboxing providing a moment of pause. Whatever the idea is it is always something that is possible, but not easy. It’s going to require the right partner or sets of partners to achieve.

And when pitching these concepts to the client it’s important to explain where the difficulties lie. What concerns you, what creates the anxiety, and even explain the areas of your concept that you haven’t completely figured out.

The point of this stage is to share ideas, be open, listen to feedback and realize the client doesn’t have to love your ideas. Concepts are a talking point to further the discussion to uncover what will deliver a memorable experience.

If you’re not uncomfortable or a little fearful, you’r not doing it right. Stop playing it safe and share your fears with your client.

If you’ve ever felt this way or have a different process for innovation let me know on linkedin or twitter. I’d love to hear from you.

It's always packaging design awards season. Either you're entering The Dieline Wards or you're waiting to see who won. But how much does winning an award really matter to the longevity of your career? Will the title of "Award Winning Packaging Designer" get you the next big gig?

Listen to what it means to win a packaging award and consider if you should enter the next one.

A recent questions by listener Enrique F. asks:

How do you always deliver innovative packaging designs and structural engineering? 

The answer is, by doing more reps, building new designs, and copying other designs because the more you test out concepts the more you'll have in your idea bank. 

Don't copy to duplicate, copy to learn and apply those learnings to your own designs and your own packaging design style.

The idea that a brand trying to save money on packaging design is going to create a folding carton that consumers will actually use to decorate their home is ridiculous. Reusable packaging systems like Tom Szaky's Loop is different it actually gets reused. Creating packaging for CPGs that is a throwaway item and market it as reusable, is less helpful than clearly stating to the consumer how to properly recycle the packaging.

Keep recycling easy, don't complicate it. It's complicated enough.

Let me know what you think.

Find Evelio Mattos on LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/EvelioMattos

How often do you consider the amount of plastic packaging in feminine hygiene products?

Probably not often enough. 

These products are packaged in tiny single serve plastics that are too small to be separated by curbside collectors. Size makes the plastic packaging and applicator less than desirable, so let's discuss what brands are out there designing sustainable tampon packaging. 

Let's discuss the different brands tackling this issue and how they're designing sustainable tampon packaging today.

So, you’re fresh out of school or putting feelers out for a new gig?

How do you get noticed?

Whether you’re one of the 3 Million downloads my books have accumulated, seen my work on packaging websites, or caught my content online. There’s an old school way to get noticed. Keep your head down and crank out great work.

Or the not so new way to get noticed. Get your work in front of eyeballs.

Here’s how:

1) Timing.

What’s happening today or next week? Is there a movie being released, a fashion drop, some Pharma cold chain packaging getting press?

Jump on it.

When Tim Cook was on stage doing the first keynote for the Apple Watch my buddy John Turner and I saw an opportunity. We saw that you’d be needing to charge yet another apple product, so we thought why shouldn’t the packaging include a watch and phone charging station in the pack.

Within 20 minutes we had rendered a full concept for the Apple Watch that took into consideration charging both your phone and watch.

We gained a million views within 3 days and every blog picked it up from Mac Rumors to The Dieline.

We had offers to buy the concept from tech brands, and consumers lining up for pre-orders.

We got noticed in under a half hour.

2) Fake it til you make it.

You can generate buzz with fake packaging. Just like we did for the Apple Watch, the founders of Liquid Death Mountain Water built a business on a photoshopped can.

They designed the concept, shared the image of the packaging because no point in showing the product - it’s just water.

They ran some ads and got feedback that consumers were interested, not only that they got a ton of social impressions.

After the photoshopped can, all they had to do was figure out how to build an entire business. The packaging was the easy part that got them noticed.

3) Provide Value

I released 2 books for Free, Packaging & Dielines 1 & 2. Shared the books on The Dieline, shared each page on Pinterest, and anywhere I knew they’d get seen by designers and start-ups looking for innovative packaging concepts they could make themselves.

Several Years, and 3 Million downloads later - these books are used in nearly every design program and pages from the book flood Pinterest anytime you type in Packaging.

Providing value means giving of yourself, you can do this by sharing packaging hacks you may have learned.

You can share concepts that didn’t make the client cut, or sharing packaging that completely failed explain what you learned from it.

If you want to get noticed, do good work. But make sure your name is tied to the work and shared with a purpose.

As creatives we can feel like a slimy car salesman when we share our work. But don’t. If sharing work wasn’t part of the gig, you wouldn’t be familiar with the work of your favorite designers.

Share it proudly.

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Should you label something recyclable just because it's technically recyclable? Creating a single polymer flexible film wrapper or flow-wrap that requires stpre drop-off isn't a solution based on current store drop-off rates. Making something recyclable isn't the challenge, but designing packaging with material that's desirable after recycling is. 

Coke just released images of their new paper bottle and there is a ton of coverage without any asking is paper bottles are actually sustainable packaging? How you design packaging and minimize packaging waste isn't always about material selection, but about human behaviors.

Let's discuss how Coke's packaging may work and how consumers may interact with it to dispose of it. 

Everyone is discussing sustainable packaging right now. Yet few know what sustainability means and even fewer understand circular systems. So how do you have a conversation with a client regarding sustainable packaging, you have to draw a line and decide whether you want to get paid or risk losing a client. But it's time to have a frank conversation. 

It's not easy to buy fashion packaging for start-ups. You'll run into Minimum Order Quantity issues, sizing, production limitations if you're not prepared. Learn how to measure garments, size your packaging, and get stated creating packaging for your start-up today.

There's been many conversations on Clubhouse regarding sustainable packaging and there's a lot of confusion. Today we're talking about a few recent ones and what you need to know. Find me on Clubhouse, Instagram, or Twitter @eveliomattos

Have a question? Connect with me on LinkedIn I'd love to answer it there.

Who is the user you're designing packaging for? Are you aware of all of the users that will interact with your packaging design, and how should you approach their needs?

In this episode we discuss the line of users that will interact with your packaging design and what they each need from your design. Distribution center employees and the manufacturer, what you'll need to consider to deliver packaging on time and in budget.

We also look at the final user, the consumer and what they need the packaging design to deliver each and every time. The product. 

Listen to get a different perspective on user experience in packaging design and new ways to consider packaging before you begin designing anything.

Connect with Evelio

In episode #1 we tackle the first three questions every packaging designer should ask before taking on a new packaging design challenge.
How much, How many, and When? Based on my HOW Design Live presentation you'll understand why these three questions set everyone up for success by setting expectations from the start.

Connect with Evelio: