The future of in-store testing By Josh Brooks, Event Director, PCD Paris.
COVID-19 has changed many things, one of these is how consumers can test cosmetic and beauty products instore. This challenge was put to a group of bright packaging students. n-store testers for beauty and cosmetics are crucial to a consumer’s purchasing beauty packaging innovation decision. But the practice, and its community - last year set a packaging formats, are facing challenge to a group of packaging major challenges as the world and beauty business students: to gears up to emerge from the reimagine the Covid crisis. future of in-store First, and a beauty testers. direct impact of Covid, is The brief was perfectly PCD Paris hygiene. Parts of respected, and the teamed up the market are solutions presented with ESEPAC, a moving towards, were of high quality. The leading French and demanding, packaging touchless very detailed projects engineering solutions that revealed both highly school, and the allow shoppers technical aspects and Ecole Supérieure to test a du Parfum to interesting marketing product without launch the touching the concepts that could challenge. same tester as be retained by certain The fifth-year another person. brands looking for new students – 20 And second is from ESEPAC and the increasing ideas. 39 from ESP restrictions worked together on single-use plastics that are being imposed by in five teams, remotely, over the autumn to develop their concepts legislatures across the world. for the future of in-store testing. The project then culminated in That’s why PCD – Packaging of an online presentation of the Perfume, Cosmetics and Design, concepts to a judging panel led by the world’s leading event for the
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Vincent Delavenne, Vice-President of luxury packaging at Coty, which sponsored the competition. Speaking after the judging day, Delavenne praised the five “innovative” projects that had been presented. “The brief was perfectly respected, and the solutions presented were of high quality. The very detailed projects revealed both highly technical aspects and interesting marketing concepts that could be retained by certain brands looking for new ideas. Our ‘future noses’ and ‘future packagers’ will be excellent ambassadors in our industry tomorrow,” he comments. For PCD Paris, which is organised by Easyfairs, the competition is an important initiative in its mission to drive the future of packaging development and innovation for the global beauty packaging market. We were incredibly impressed by the quality of the concepts presented. But more than that, it is very exciting to be part of a project like this that
