2020

The Client

Company of Animals (COA) is a world leading developer and manufacturer of pet products. All their design and development of both product and packaging happens in the UK.

COA undertook a wholesale product redevelopment, branding and packaging review. London agency Springetts were contracted to redevelop the visual identity, while we were engaged to work on structural packaging.

The Challenge

COA's products were previously packed in plastic clamshell packs or packs with a high plastic component. As an ethical company focused on animal welfare, this is something they were keen to change.

COA recommends that consumers try their product on their animals for the correct fit before purchase, In retail environments where access to specific 'try-on' samples can be limited, retailers require that the packaging can be opened and closed by the consumer in store - and that product remains in a saleable condition afterwards.

Clamshells have offered the company a convenient and practical way of achieving this - but at the expense of using unsustainable materials that have an increasingly negative consumer opinion.

The challenge was to solve this problem - create a sustainable, durable and easy to use pack using only sustainable materials.

Our Design                    

Our new structural design solution to replace the plastic clamshells is a deceptively simple; a roll-over end tray held in a hangable sleeve. The key product features include

• Strong visual presence
• Fully Recyclable & compostable
• Designed for repeated opening & closing
• Open tray for easy product access & packing
• More room for product information vs clamshell products.
• Adaptable to all required sizes
• Stable for shelf stacking

Beyond this, the pack was developed to be attractive, practical and durable enough to be kept and used for product storage at home - extending it's useful life to match that of the product.

Impact

Across the whole project, more than 1,200,000 plastic packs have been replaced with our sustainable alternatives within the first 9 months of introduction to market.

The new clamshell replacement uses just three pack sizes across the whole product range, all with pallet friendly cube dimensions replace 18 different clamshell packs. The packs share common trays across all SKU's - creating significant sourcing & logistics advantages, and has created up to 25% cube volume reductions vs their original versions.

These innovations have resulted in shipping dramatically less air than before. The work we provided fed into a wider packaging performance and pallet utilisation project, and has helped save money and improved the company's ability to adapt to ever increasing online sales.

Our new pack design won ‘Resource Efficient Pack of the Year' at the 2020 UK Packaging Awards.