How Better Packaging Can Help Your Career

Several hands and skill sets are involved in package design and production: designers, engineers, marketing professionals, sales executives and production managers. Every one of them brings something to the table.

Ingenuity knows no boundaries. It can originate in the graphic design, the packaging engineering or the production process. Besides eye catching design, ingenuity leads to increased sales, cost-saving production processes or any combination that leads to greater profitability.

The people who identify these opportunities get noticed and often promoted. Because anything that translates penny-savings into millions of dollars on the bottom line does not go unrewarded.

Could you identify a design opportunity to increase functionality of the package design? Simpler design can result in dramatic cost savings? How is labeling integrated? What materials are involved? Technology is changing so rapidly that anyone involved in package design could not be faulted for not knowing today’s last advancements that could change your company’s bottom line line tomorrow.

The people who do stay on top of ingenuity and innovation in package design are the producers. And the smart professionals responsible for package design do not look at the production facilities as ‘suppliers’ but as a resource and a potential partner.

Think you know what materials should be used in the production process? Through material choices, you might be able to shave ½ a gram off the weight of each package. Multiple that by a millions of units and you have see a ton of savings. Literally.

What if a production process such as vision technology can reduce package rejects to zero? Think of the savings in wasted man hours alone. Someone, somewhere needs to identify a faulty package to ensure it never makes it to the store shelves. Defects (and production will always have them) cost money at a variety of points in the product production timeline. Avoiding them at source is ingenuity at work.

What if you could prevent that defect from ever making it to your facility? If you are the one who identifies that opportunity, it can be a career changer.

Did you identify an opportunity to make your brilliant package design also theft resistant? A career changer.

What if you could environmentally quantify design choices to the equivalent number of cars your design keeps off the road? Any forward-looking company has the environment as a priority. A career changer.

There is a lot more to packaging than a pretty face. And anyone involved in packaging would be wise to consult the front-line packaging professionals.

Chances are, they can show you ways to make your design stronger, more environmentally friendly, cheaper to produce or any combination of the above. And anyone of those factors can be a career changer.

Package design ingenuity can come from almost anywhere. Talk to a packaging producer. And have it become you. Ingenuity can be a game changer. And a career booster.