Behind the Scenes: The Packaging Design Process and Its Importance in Product Success

Ever wondered what’s happening in the process of packaging design and manufacturing?
Here is a glimpse of how we make it at mPackting, to offer insights into the packaging design process, from concept to execution, and how it influences a product's success.

From Client’s brief to our Design Office 

First and foremost, design starts with a brief. Sometimes beauty brands want to develop a custom design, and this is when this phase can take more or less time depending on the design requirements but also the rapidity of execution - i.e. back and forth between brand and design team.

According to the brand guidelines and positioning on the market and the custom demand, it appears particularly important to identify the feasibility of the project. Depending on the applications - make-up, skincare, haircare, etc - and the size of the range, choices will need to be made to ensure “manufacturability”. This when our internal design team can help bring their expertise and guide the project.

At mPackting we have also developed our own sustainable materials and we will take this into consideration from the design phase, ensuring the MOST sustainable version of the project according to market design standards, and production requirements.

Design for Manufacturing & Prototyping

Our offices and european headquarter located at the production site, we can easily trace back to production manager for design adaptation and prototyping. This gives us flexibility and also save us a lot of time in the design process. Everything being done internally, and everyone having their own expertise allows us to deliver project with a smooth process.

For clients wishing to visiting us, they can have the opportunity to understand see our mastery at work. We love design, and most of all we love serving product that works and reduce the environmental impact of beauty packaging, that’s why we mostly use plan-based materials.

If you were to chose a “white-label” range, it means that the phase of design and manufacturing would already be pre-designed. We would just work with your team for finishes and decorations. We hae developed and exclusive, white-label, and versatile range that is available for luxury beauty packaging with compact, lipsticks and skincare jars.

Materials for manufacturing

Once the idea of the design is clearer, we can look into materials selection that will enhance the design and reflect the brand’s ethos. Depending on the material used the messaging surrounding the brand packaging can be very different. Sustainable materials can convey a strong message in-line with consumer demand.

mPackting designs and produces eco-friendly packaging solutions using responsibly sourced materials such as wood, cork, and mBlack, which are renewable and recyclable. Materials is just one aspect of sustainable products. But it’s a good start! Here are a few examples of materials incorporated in our designs.

• Wood, first of all, is a beautiful, renewable, and biodegradable resource that helps us remove CO2 from the atmosphere. To maintain this virtuous cycle, we source all our woods from responsibly managed forests (FSC-Certified) to ensure our customers that the raw materials we use are sustainably harvested.

• Cork, gives our product a sensational soft-touch feeling and a natural look while being totally safe for both the customer and the planet. In fact, it is 100% safe for food contact, and it is 100% biodegradable and recyclable multiple times, and by essence cork sequestrates CO2 from the environment.

• Using Biochar is our solution to avoid wood releasing most of its trapped CO2 during disposal and degradation in landfills. Biochar is an excellent carbon sink, which means that it, just like cork, does not release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere but instead permanently traps them. This makes pyrolyzed wood chips a new material that can bring more value while providing thermal energy from the transformation process.

• mBlack is our plant-based material that can be molded like plastic without being plastic. It is cost-effective and, like our other materials, a scalable carbon sink. But that's not all: while developing the material, we wanted to make it an ideal choice for environmentally conscious beauty product consumers. Therefore, it is biodegradable, food-grade, and decomposes without leaving microplastics behind, avoiding interference with the food supply chain.

• Pulp is a versatile and sustainable material that is made from plant fibers, such as wood, bamboo, or sugarcane. Like our other materials, pulp is biodegradable and can be recycled multiple times. It is also a renewable resource, as trees can be replanted and grown to produce more pulp. By incorporating pulp into our packaging solutions, we are able to offer even more options for sustainable and environmentally responsible beauty packaging.

Where do we source

When it comes to more sustainable solutions, the location of the production facilities is also key to reducing the overall carbon footprint. If your beauty brand is based in Europe, it’s definitely better to source everything in the European Union and as close as possible to your laboratory and logistical centre as possible. With this idea in mind, at mPackting we’ve developed local partnerships in a radius of approximately 150 km from our production plant. We also create our proprietary material mBlack - which is compostable and a carbon sink - from our own manufacturing wood waste, and a biopolymer that is 100% biodegradable, and sourced nearby.

We are based in the northern Italian region of Bergamo, and find most of our partners locally in Italy and France.

Thanks to a localised supply chain we control cost, and material delivery, and manage manufacturing ensuring an agile process.
With the cost of materials rising and the added pressure on the supply chain and markets, it’s more and more important to develop a short, secure supply chain.

Culture

We pursue a culture of excellence within our company, we offer our staff special training when joining our ranks, and we work with an innovative mindset.

We bring incremental innovation to packaging, to ensure that we can offer the best design and solutions, as we hope to take the beauty industry to the next level of sustainability solutions thanks to our low-carbon offering.

Let us know which product you are working on for which we can support you!