A global benchmark for packaging

Blackmores is an Australian icon, one of the country's most established vitamins and minerals businesses and its most trusted health brand for 12 years running, with a large presence across Asia. But the category had commoditised at home, competitors had caught up, and the business knew the brand risked looking dated. It wanted to rejuvenate its packaging, fixing well-known usability pain points and modernising materials, but first it needed a rigorous, evidence-based picture of what best-in-class packaging looked like around the world, before any design began.

I designed and led the discovery, a global research programme built on three pillars drawn from the brief: consumer-led design, effective brand identity, and sustainable design. Every judgement that followed traced back to those three.

We started with immersion: a desk review of Blackmores' own research and strategy, 12 interviews with internal stakeholders across the business, and 11 interviews with global packaging experts. Those fed a co-creation session with the client, where we turned the three pillars into a working scorecard, the dimensions we would actually judge products against, from convenience and usability to sustainability and brand storytelling.

With the scorecard agreed, local teams built a long list of more than 200 brands and refined it to around 30 per territory. In the three fieldwork markets, Australia, China and South Korea, every product was bought and scored on the ground against all three pillars. Beyond them, FutureBrand teams in the USA and Europe ran a global desk review to surface strong examples we couldn't buy and test in person. Aggregated and normalised across markets, the scoring narrowed everything to around 50 best-in-class case studies. Each one broke down its scores, said plainly what made it interesting, and used candid unboxing imagery to show the real first-use experience, from Korean refill systems like Innisfree to home-compostable bioplastic films.

The report became the reference point for Blackmores' packaging innovation, presented to senior stakeholders and used to steer the work that followed. That work took recyclable materials across the Blackmores range to 98% of total packaging.