From the USA – The Smart Bottle
To turn heads, you need to be different. That’s the introduction phrase Exopack uses on its website, to provide, as they state, a unique combination of resources and experience to help to succeed.
The development of Exopack’s Smart Bottle is indeed a head-turner. The new packaging features a four sided sealed pouch that is blowmoulded into a “bottle”. After filling, the four side-seals form the four vertical corners of a lightweight, semi-rigid, threaded “bottle”, the result of merging different packaging technologies together.
The packaging is not yet commercially available, but has been tested in volume sizes ranging from ½ gallon, up to 5 gallons. It can hold either dry or liquid contents and can be printed on all four sides.
From France – Poetry for Coca Cola
Coca Cola is probably the most inspiring brand, stimulating many a designer to employ its creativity to redesign the Coca Cola bottle, without ever asked by the company. French designer Jerome Olivet didn’t have the intention to create a more eco-friendly packaging, but just wanted to express his love for the drink visualized in his new design. The new Coca Cola bottle, baptized Mystic, is described on his website as:
“Mystic surprises by its beauty and intensity. It was created to live an intense and fleeting moment. Its racy style describes a supernatural world which soars skyward. Its skin has a sculpted unique spiritual experience. It sends us all the energy and excitement of Coca-Cola. Its sexy lines and red colour give happiness in three dimensions. Both organic shapes intertwine and form a body ambiguous and fascinating. Its loving silhouette, ties into a true popular poetry.”
From Croatia – To-Go Modular Take-Away Boxes
In order to anticipate smaller orders due to a decline in customer orders, Istragrafika, a cardboard packaging factory in Rovinj, Croatia, explored new market opportunities. One of them was entering the fast food market which was, in contrast to the economic downturn, on the upswing and one of the rare ones recording increase in consumption.
Its industrial designer Zoran Svraka created a family of packaging solutions for the fast food industry, which includes a separate “take&go” French fries holder with sauce cup, as well as modular, multifunctional take-away meal boxes with added clip-on containers for salads and/or desserts. All in non-glued eco-friendly folding cardboard, with a minimum of polyethylene coating for direct food contact.
Although the boxes are manually assembled on the spot, they do not leak fluid out of the box.
From Sweden – The Wine Purse
Bag-in-Box designs for wine have been around for years, but the “Vernissage” wine packaging launched on the Swedish market in a bag-in-box system, is a very special wine bag-in-box as the ‘box’ is a female purse. The target group was consumers of white wine, which in Sweden are mostly women aged over 25. Graphic designer Sofia Blomberg, together with Italian cardboard packaging supplier BoxMarche examined the technical possibilities for an innovative solution and designed a completely new bag-in-box in the shape of a handbag.
The result is an elegant design, that would appeal to women far more than conventional boxes. A perfect packaging for a characteristically typical mixture of French Chardonnay and Viognier produced in one of Europe’s most northern wineries, Nordic Sea Winery in Sweden.
From the USA – Communicate through the SnapTag
Some years ago, I wrote about a dry-soup packaging of Heinz Japan pioneering the use of 2D bar codes capable of being scanned by smart-phones to deliver additional information to users. In Japan it’s very common at this moment. The rest of the world is far behind.
SpyderLynk’s SnapTags technology is a brandable, application-free alternative to 2D mobile bar codes that turns the marketer’s logo into a mobile gateway to additional content. Colorado AC Golden Brewing Co., decided that the SnapTag was an affordable option to communicate with its consumers and introduced it with the launch of its new Colorado Native Lager. The stylized “C” inside a printed circle that appears on the bottles, is the SnapTag. Consumers use camera phones to snap and text a photo of the SnapTag to a phone number that appears with the logo. The SnapTag response is returned to the consumer via a text or multimedia message.
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