Cultivating Efficiency in Package Design

EskoArtwork Brand Owner Survey Reveals the Brand Owner Perspective

By:  Cary Sherburne

May 14th, 2009 -- I was interested to see the brand owner survey recently released by EskoArtwork.  It is always refreshing to see suppliers to our industry reaching out to the end beneficiaries of their solutions in order to better understand the business drivers they deal with on a daily basis and what they are thinking about the future.  Especially as the entire printing industry, even packaging, is increasingly affected by the digital transition, WhatTheyThink wanted to gain a little more insight into the work EskoArtwork is doing to ease the business transformation that is surely coming our way.  We spoke with Susie Stitzel, EskoArtwork Solution Manager, Design Lifecycle Management; and Stan Lemmens, EskoArtwork Marketing Manager Packaging to learn more. We understand that survey results will be released soon.

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WTT:  Thank you both for taking time to speak with us today.  I was interested in the brand owner survey and wondered if you routinely sell your products to the brand owner side, or if this was a learning opportunity as you think about the future of your products for converters.

SS:  The majority of our sales are to converters, label printers, commercial printers and others on the print production side.  But about 14% of our revenues are as a result of sales to tradeshops, designers and brand owners.  Brand owners are much less concerned about prepress, but much more concerned about design.  They would mostly be purchasing design-related tools such as ArtiosCAD, design tools that are used inside of Adobe Illustrator, DeskPack, Studio, and Visualizer.  We also sell collaboration and automation tools to them, such as WebCenter and BackStage. They have a need to design and execute in a technically correct way, and they have a need to communicate about packaging with both their suppliers and their retailers. Even though it is a small part of our business now (about 5%), the brand owner activity is growing pretty dramatically.  Evangelizing with brand owners also results in some pull-through sales with our printer and converter customer base.  Some of the tools are actually used at the printer, but the brand owner sees efficiency and economic gain through the use of these tools.

SL:  The products that Susie mentioned are generally categorize as elements of our Design Lifecycle Management solution.

WTT:  How do you position Design Lifecycle Management with brand owners?

SL:  The basic idea is shown in the image below and is based on five key values:

1. To enhance their processes, procedures and procurement, as well as they way they communicate.
2. To help them create things more effectively in a way that fits into the supply chain properly.
3. To help them standardize procedures.  We don’t talk to them in technical terms so much, but there is a technical explanation at the end when they talk to printers and converters that is quite important as well, around file conversion.
4. Compliancy, placing elements and procedures into the software that allow them to be in compliance with the U.S. FDA and European legislative organizations.
5. Sustainability, thinking both economically and ecologically about product design.

WTT:  Does this mean that brand owners are pulling more work in-house?

SL:  The brand owners are bringing some things in-house, but some things they will stay away from.  They are not interested in major things like screening and trapping; that is for the supplier.  But a lot of brand owners have in-house packaging design.  Some do total packaging design from concept all the way through; others do maintenance design and branding.  So for example, a new product would go to an agency for a first round, and then the brand owner’s design team maintains the brand going forward.

SS:  Brand owners do want to be more technically astute and they want more control over their packaging assets.  If you have too many assets spread over too many suppliers, there is too much risk, especially in packaging.

WTT:  How is this changing the relationships with suppliers?

SL:  Consumer product companies (CPCs) outsource a lot of activities to third parties, such as prepress, designers, converters.  In Europe, we see that a lot of these big brand owners are hiring semi-technical people, marketers with a prepress background, in order to look at internal procedures in their companies.  I have spoken with a few people from large CPCs who want that expertise in-house to ensure that what third parties are doing for them are done in the best possible manner.  Also, in Europe, there is a lot of complexity with multiple languages and different regulations for each country and country zone.  That is another reason they are taking more of this complex way of working back into the brand owner facility.

SS:  There is also a very interesting trend we are starting to see whereby businesses are starting to be very interested in some forms of localized just-in-time printing co-located with their manufacturing lines, in particular digital print, with HP Indigo and similar products.  So for example, the toothpaste tube is filled with toothpaste and goes into a folding carton.  That folding carton might be manufactured by a digital press co-located with the filling line.  This won’t work in all cases, but we are definitely seeing it in labels on bottles, like just-in-time manufacturing of wine, where the bottle is filled and the labels are printed alongside.

WTT:  Are the brand owners investing in these presses?

SS:  Many are, or at least investigating it.

WTT:  Was this your first brand owner survey?

SL:  Yes.  When we spoke with brand owners about our products, it was always about the current state.  We wanted to find out what the future of packaging would be.  The survey was conducted primarily in Benelux[1], and it also included respondents from the UK, Sweden and Denmark.  We will do some U.S. surveys later.  In the first phase, we wanted to understand their vision of the future of packaging, and how they will work with designers and converters, as well as what changes new technology will make in the way they work within their own workgroups.

WTT:  What are some of the key findings of the survey?

SL:  We were interested in outsourcing trends, and respondents told us that about 50% of the jobs are outsourced to packaging converters; they expect that to grow.  Another trend we noticed was around digital prototyping.  A lot of packaging needs to be prototyped during the design process.  This process is expensive and time-consuming, and can mean the loss of 3, 4 or 5 working days.  The printer creates the prototype, laminates it and folds it.  Sometimes there are different variations from which the final package must be chosen.  With Esko Visualizer, they can create a virtual digital mockup in 3D that can show the different substrates and finishing effects under different lighting and environmental conditions, on screen.  Fifty to sixty percent of respondents expect an increase in the use of digital prototyping.

SS:  At some point you must make a hardcopy proof for color matching. But we’ve seen that you can eliminate the first five to ten comps and associated mark-ups by using virtual prototyping, and thereby speed up the decision-making and approval process.  Generally speaking, rapid prototyping in a technically correct way that can be produced as you are designing can deliver a minimum of 35% to 50% reduction in time to market with these tools.

WTT:  This survey was taken last Fall.  Do you think the results would be different if you surveyed now, with the current economic condition?

SL:  The economy is certainly changing the way they think about their work and sustainability.  We are now hearing brand owners say they can’t spend as much on third parties.  In an economic situation like this, packaging is one of the last segments to get hit but also one of the first to recover, as warehouse stocks begin to be depleted. We are just now seeing some of that activity picking up and we hope that is good news in general about the economy.

WTT:  Can you explain what you mean by sustainability, with perhaps an example?

SL:  Don’t mix this up with green thinking.  That is not the entire point.  They are looking at it both economically and ecologically; how can they earn money by being sustainable.  One example is a cultivator that is manufactured in Asia. The manufacturer needs to balance consumer convenience and ease of use with the supply chain dynamics.  In this case, they could put 435 units in a shipping container and were left with a lot of dead space.  Their first thought was to collapse the handle with wing nuts and remove the blades and wheels for customer assembly.  But using sophisticated packaging design tools like ArtiosCAD, they realized that they could redesign the product without compromising customer satisfaction and ease of use. Minor product and packaging changes allowed them to put 504 units in a shipping container, resulting in 24 fewer containers per year.  Across five different products using this approach, the company was able to save almost 500 shipping containers per year.  This type of work can only be done if packaging design and manufacturing work very closely together from the beginning of the process.

SS:  It has been proven time and again that if you do the right things to be sustainable, you can also improve the bottom line.  Packaging can be designed to be able to place more products on the pallet, more products in containers, more pallets in the truck, and so on. If they can optimize packaging around the product, they get both an ecological and an economic gain.  The focus must be on right-sizing that package for the back end logistics with things like shipping in mind, and that often requires some change in the product design as well.

Susie Stitzel is EskoArtwork’s Solution Manager for Design Lifecycle Management, responsible for creating packaging design solutions for consumer product companies and design agencies. Susie has more than 20 years experience in the prepress, printing, and packaging industries. Her roles have covered a wide spectrum of the industry, including management of large digital prepress departments, team leader for worldwide customer support, and training and product management for Contex Prepress Systems, Barco Graphics, and now EskoArtwork. Susie holds a BA from Kenyon College and also did postgraduate studies on Computer Science at the University of Southern Maine. She can be reached via e-mail at: susie.stitzel@esko.com.

Stan Lemmens has been active in the graphical world for more than 20 years, including 5 years as Technical Adviser in a pharmaceutical and food labels printing house; 3 years as System-Manager in a printing house specialized in high quality printing; some years as Technical Manager in companies specialized in system integration of graphical workstations, workflows and equipment, and 10 years as Graphical application specialist in one of the largest repro-house in Europe. He currently serves at a number of universities specialized in Graphical Arts and Science in Belgium and has been active as a speaker or moderator in several seminars and events. In 2004 Lemmens’ joined Artwork Systems as Marketing Manager. Currently he has the function of marketing manager packaging in EskoArtwork. E-mail: stan.lemmens@esko.com

 

[1] Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg

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