ORGANISERS of London Packaging Week have revealed that this year’s event will bring together leading minds at a moment when packaging is no longer competing for attention, but for meaning — where cultural pressure, commercial reality and consumer expectation collide.
The exhibition, to be held from September 16-17 at Excel London, aims to reflect the scale and intensity of an industry redefining how packaging is designed, experienced and commercialised.
For Kelly Dawson, co-founder and an innovation strategist at Studio Every, the starting point is not aesthetics or even category norms, but behaviour. “Understanding the market begins with understanding people in motion,” she said. “We’re looking at how expectations are evolving across categories, not just within them. What people tolerate, what they ignore, and what they actively seek out is constantly changing. Packaging has to respond to that shift, not resist it.”
As Jo Smith, design & visual identity leader at Diageo, puts it, the challenge is rarely a lack of ambition, but a failure of translation. “Agencies want bold ideas that stretch the brief. Clients are measured on market share, growth, performance, and brand reputation. The reality is that everyone wants the same thing: work that works.”
It is in that gap, between intent and outcome, that ideas are most often lost. But interpretation without structure quickly becomes aesthetic noise. For Gaby Granier, associate strategy director at Boundless Brand Design, the differentiator lies in how brands build coherent worlds that can hold meaning over time. “We focus on how brands make people feel,” she said. “Designing with both playfulness and thoughtfulness, we create emotional stickiness to ensure audiences feel genuinely understood. This approach creates brands people return to and love to talk about.”
This idea of coherence is increasingly extending beyond identity into physical form itself. As Nick Vaus, co-founder and managing partner at Free The Birds, notes, structure is becoming a defining competitive lever in saturated categories.
“We’re seeing a clear shift, particularly within beauty, towards more bespoke structural design and a move away from traditional off-the-shelf solutions,” he explained. “This shift is largely driven by saturation. Beauty, like many categories, has become intensely crowded, both on shelf and in the scroll.”
Lisa Cain, technical lead – food, confectionery & premium drinks at Smurfit WestRock, added that the market is forcing brands to confront what is real versus what is excess. “We’ve spent years adding layers — more finishes, more complexity, more justification. But increasingly, value is being redefined by what you remove rather than what you add.”
Sasha Ferguson, creative design manager at Castle Colour Packaging, brings the final perspective: the translation of intent into something that can physically exist in the world without distortion.
“We don’t design in isolation,” he said. “We design with manufacturing, logistics and reality in the room from the start.”
