WHAT’S THE SECRET TO EFFECTIVE E-COMMERCE PACKAGING DESIGN?

Libby Munford talks with a leading expert, Brent Lindberg, founder of Fuseneo, to discuss best practice in the field of e-commerce packaging design.

WHAT’S THE SECRET TO EFFECTIVE E-COMMERCE PACKAGING DESIGN?

LM: Could you tell me a bit about Fuseneo?

BL: Fuseneo is really about merging different disciplines, talents, materials and processes to create something new. I founded the company about 13 years ago to help brands navigate packaging challenges in design, prototyping and manufacture.

We have a team made up of industrial designers, graphic designers, and packaging engineers. We are material and process agnostic, meaning that we can help brands to look across multiple materials and options when we help them to tackle issues like sustainability or e-commerce.

I founded the company after spending about a decade on the manufacturing side as an in-house designer for a large manufacturer. I saw the challenges that brands faced in terms of owning their own design equity and understanding their options.

They would go to a manufacturer, who would want to sell them the thing they made. So, unless they worked on projects with a dozen different manufacturers, they really didn’t know what their options were. Then, when it came to negotiating, if that manufacturer designed it then they probably owned it. I saw a number of these challenges, so really wanted to create a separate team that could help brands design and manage packaging.

LM: And how has your company been working throughout the pandemic?

BL: We’ve been fortunate. We have a large studio and shop here because of all the prototyping and fabrication, and that’s been challenging with only allowing one person at a time to come in.

We’ve been able to work from home, and I’ve seen a shift in some of the projects that have been going on. There are certain brands that have

struggled and put the brakes on, but others have been going strong. Some brands have struggled with development and innovation, due to things like travel restrictions and manufacturing capacity.

We’ve been fortunate through this but it’s definitely been different.

LM: You’ve worked on some really high-profile projects with clients like Starbucks and Amazon. Could you perhaps tell me about an e-commerce project that you worked on with Amazon?

BL: Most of our clients are large brands like Pepsi, Amazon, Starbucks, and Google. Their challenges are larger and their stakes are higher because they work on a bigger scale – this means that packaging is really critical for them.

Amazon actually reached out to us about five years ago. They wanted help both with redesigning their own packaging and on defining standards around e-commerce packaging. So, we’ve been doing everything from helping them with strategy around packaging to communication with vendors on what the future of e-commerce packaging looks like and how we can keep pushing it.

One day we might be designing a fun on-box campaign, and the next day we might be helping them to figure out how to deliver restaurant food. It’s really a diverse set of challenges that all centre on packaging.

LM: What are the main factors you have to consider when you’re working on a project with Amazon?

BL: For e-commerce protection it’s all about a balance between protection and sustainability, and minimizing things like waste and damage. Customer experience is also important, because packaging is a consumer’s first touchpoint with a brand. LM: And what would you say makes bad design for e-commerce?

BL: There’s a lot of it! I think that bad e-commerce packaging assumes that a company like Amazon is going to ship items safely and efficiently. You’re taking a gamble by assuming that whoever is fulfilling the order understands your product and has the right tools to protect it.

It also assumes that what’s working in another channel is going to work in e-commerce. A lot of the time, this is just sending the on-shelf packaging to Amazon for them to deal with. Or this just looks like over-packaging.

Retailers like Amazon are sending things like big clocks, mirrors, kayaks, and gallons of chemicals – a ridiculously diverse range of products. We need to think of these online retailers as fulfilment operators, not shippers.

LM: Can brands keep in touch with consumers in the same way through e-commerce as they do with the bricks and mortar shopping experience?

BL: Data is valuable. Brands are used to having a certain amount of it, as well as certain level of interaction with customers and control over placement on shelves. They lose a little bit of this with e-commerce, and they often need to make this up in other areas which is really challenging.

So, how brands create fans and followers is always worth consideration, especially now that consumers are more distant now than they were before.

LM: Since the Corona outbreak, the move from physical to e-commerce has sped-up. Can you give me some insight into your views on this?

BL: I think for a team like ours that has been beating the drum on intentional e-commerce packaging and really focus on it as a growing segment, we’ve been saying this for years.

Some sectors, like consumer electronics, have been heavily invested in e-commerce for a number of years, but some of them haven’t been and oftentimes only a single-digit percentage of their sales volume comes from that channel. This means that it sometimes hasn’t been big enough to matter.

COVID has brought e-commerce to the forefront, and I think brands are realizing that it’s going to take something different than they’ve had before, and that it has to be viewed as its own channel.

LM: Have you noticed any changes in terms of what your clients have been asking for?

BL: Despite the challenges with implementation at the moment, due to travel restrictions and capacity issues, the requests we get still often revolve around sustainability, although they are getting broader.

Brands are really willing to rethink their products. If it’s a product that is liquid, maybe there’s a different format for it. If it’s something that is fragile, then maybe there should be different considerations around it. So, brands are willing to go where they wouldn’t before to rethink their products and packaging to see e-commerce as a viable and main sales channel for them.

For the longest time, e-commerce has been this ‘bandage phase’, where companies think that they can just put extra packaging on a product, and everything will be fine.

Now we’re moving into a stage where the packaging is adapted, and we think we will eventually be in a place where both packaging and product are adapted in order to make the product more efficient and viable in that channel.

LM: We focus a lot on sustainability here at Packaging Europe, and there tends to be a bit of a lag in the e-commerce sector. How do you factor sustainability into packaging design?

BL: I think it needs to look at the function of every component and consider material choice. We like to help brands understand the impact of something they may think is minor, like extra packaging. They see the costs involved but are often willing to offset or write these off.

We talk to them about things like how excess material and excess packaging mean excess volume, which leads to them being able to fit less into trucks and warehouses and paying more to ship the products out. This also leads to an inconvenience for the customer, who has to go and dispose of all the packaging.

Sustainability is more than just the recyclability of the materials – it’s also the use of extra space, the shipping of those goods, and the ability of those customers to recycle them.

LM: What’s the importance of accelerating good design in the e-commerce sector?

BL: Through this pandemic, there are a lot of shoppers who would never have considered e-commerce beforehand who are now coming online. Particularly aging demographics who were primarily bricks-and-mortar shoppers.

For some of these people, the convenience of e-commerce is going to stick. There’s not going to be a dramatic fall-off when shops open up again, so accelerating this is important. n

Brent Lindberg