P&G Sustainable E-commerce Packaging

Problem Statement

Design an e-commerce secondary package for CPG products that minimises the amount of packaging and reduces single use packaging via exploring re-usage/re-purposing of the package.

My Role

Main Learnings

This was a graduate school project that was for the client P&G. Along with my team, I conducted in-home and user testing research. I designed possible prototyping directions and pitched multiple times to our client.

• I learnt how to work on a team that was from various backgrounds and some of which didn’t have a lot of experience with design yet.

• I was able to work with a large client (P&G) and had the opportunity to think about how our solution would fit into the company as a whole.

• On multiple occasions I was able to present our findings and progression of the project to the client.

• This was my first experience working with a recruiting agency, which meant I was able to interview people who were coming with more varied experiences.

• I had the chance to respond to our findings and recommend a pivot to the client based on these findings.

Research Stage

This project was heavily influenced by a lot of research. Both by visiting consumers in their home as well as having consumers visit us in order to get feedback on prototypes and the design directions we were considering.

In Home Visits

There were a number of themes that arose from our in home visits which included

• consumers being frustrated by the build-up of packaging in their homes.

• the excess that comes from ordering items online, in particular the amount of unnecessary filler.

• the packaging being unclear as to how it can be recycled which typically resulted in the incorrect action being taken.

Feedback Interviews

There were different objectives to each of the rounds of feedback interviews.

Round 1

With the first visit we were looking to explore further what people were currently doing with their packaging as well as which of our proposed solutions they would be willing to reuse in their home (a parameter that was set to us by the sponsoring company).

Round 2

Before our second round of feedback interviews we took a pivot with the direction of the project, due to the feedback and information we were getting from consumers in the interviews and first round of feedback. This meant that we were speaking with consumers about a whole new business model.

This included understanding what the whole eco-system would need to look like for our solution to work.

Synthesising Our Findings

After conducting all of these interviews and getting feedback on existing tensions as well as potential direction, we synthesised our findings in order to understand all of this feedback.

This included mapping out our current journey map and identifying the main pain points in this where the experience is less than ideal.

We used tools like a 2x2 to understand these tensions further and identifying the space that our solution could fit into.

Final Design

We outlined the emotional and functional requirements to our clients at P&G that our solution would need to fulfil. This included pivoting away from the direction they originally thought we should go in.

For our final deliverable we presented a shipper prototype that was inspired from origami and incorporated the different aspects that were desired from our consumers. We also presented a new service that would be incorporated with this new product offering. Finally we suggested a ‘jump’ and ‘leap’ roll out of the new system in order to have the most success.