“A coffee with…” Jose Antonio Rojano, Head of Packaging Design services, El Corte Inglés

Empack & Logistics & Automation Porto: Tell us about yourself and your work. What’s day-to-day life like for the Head of Packaging Design services at El Corte Inglés?

J.A. Rojano – I’m an Industrial and Product Designer from IED Madrid with a postgraduate qualification in MK Management from IE Business School. With a fantastic team of 12 people, we are responsible for developing the identity of the packaging for our own-brand food and non-food products. We are also part of the branding team, developing the identity of brands, companies and services that contribute to the development of our company’s business.
As part of a “creative hub” together with the Advertising team, over time we have increasingly adopted an “in-house design services” role, helping through various design services associated with the brand, various teams that lead the business strategy.
We also work with various external partners specialising in packaging design to develop our assortments or brands. The world is full of professionals with enormous creative talent, so why not invite them to take part in our projects?

E.L.Porto: Given your experience in the packaging sector, what do you see as the sector’s evolution?

J.A. Rojano – In addition to all the major current issues such as sustainability and optimisation, which are obviously of the utmost importance for the development of the sector, it’s important to focus on why these major changes are taking place.
Once it has been shown that the consumption model of recent decades is exhausted and unsustainable, how products are manufactured, with what ingredients, the carbon footprint that affects our planet and how everything is scaled for the current type of mass consumption, these are the big factors driving change.
More specifically, packaging design will soon face two major challenges associated with this scenario. On the one hand, there are the materials and formats, the emergence of specific packaging for transport or smaller ones dedicated to new types of family units (single parents or singles) means working with more raw materials. But in order to be consistent with sustainable production, innovation will be made through new materials, or through the use of others that require less industrial processing, and some types of packaging will even disappear due to their lack of usefulness in terms of the waste they generate. These new formats, “more sustainable” but perhaps less visually qualitative, may condition the design in terms of finishes, the use of paints and, therefore, the general appearance will be something different from what we are used to seeing as normal. Visually, a new visual design trend will be generated (if there isn’t already one). Materials such as Pulpex® are a good example of this vector of change and influence on design.
On a second level, but also very important for packaging design, we have everything related to product information and transparency with the customer. There will be more and more declarations, whether voluntary or required by law, about the product’s characteristics, health warnings or intolerances, value-added components of the product that differentiate it from others… All related to the information that must appear on the packaging and that a multi-tasking customer, with their own diets or lifestyles, must realise. All these particular conditions of a product, which must be differentiated from another, will also affect the layout of each packaging design.

E.L.Porto: Do you think the pandemic has changed the course that the packaging sector had set? What has this meant for El Corte Inglés as a company?

J.A. Rojano – I think that in terms of packaging, in general, some changes have happened more quickly, but almost all of them continue in the same direction as the pre-Covid era. I think the big changes that packaging is facing in the sector are more to do with the sustainability of materials and reducing the environmental impact of packaging. A plethora of niche brands have also appeared that create consumer trends with highly targetised products that are easily adopted by the customer, which are the ones that are pushing the classic-players of the mass consumption industry to reformulate their products, launch new brands or even make global commitments to improve their product portfolio in response to new consumer demands.

As I mentioned before, faced with the new multi-demand model, manufacturers are tackling these changes step by step and this will mark changes in the sector, both in design and packaging.

E.L.Porto: El Corte Inglés’ new e-commerce strategy is already on everyone’s lips. Had you already planned to bet heavily on this strategy before the pandemic? Has this strategy affected packaging decisions in any way?

J.A. Rojano – For almost two years now, we have been working on an internal entrepreneurship capsule project, in which we contribute to the company’s digital strategy for our own brand products. The main areas to benefit are the FMCG and Toys divisions. It has to do with the presentation of images of our products in e-commerce. Not only because of a significant improvement in the detail and quality of the visuals that the customer sees when buying a product from our brands on e-commerce, but also because of the very high operational, cost and process optimisation that we have achieved with this project. We’re talking about reductions in product waste, transport costs and photo production that exceed -60%. We achieved the looks immediately, according to a style guide established for the brand, with the possibility of personalising the look and total control over image quality. All this at lower operating and development costs than we’ve seen on the market.

This is a transversal project applied to the multiple assortments of own-brand products, from food packaging to toys, consumer electronics and sports accessories. The project provides a facilitating benefit for the customer, who better understands and perceives the products on the website and in the app, improves the visual identity of our products and internally, both the tool and its operation respond to the purpose of our e-commerce to always respond quickly.

E.L.Porto: Finally, what are your concerns and where do you think the key to the future of the sector lies? J.A. Rojano – As I’ve already mentioned, I personally believe that the short-term future will be marked by the adaptation of materials, new formats and the reconversion of the product portfolio towards healthy and sustainable lifestyles. For me, these are the most important vectors. In addition, I believe we will see a new evolution of social networks as a complementary sales channel to the traditional one and certainly new proposals for subscription business models, which build customer loyalty and represent a creative opportunity for packaging and unboxing. In the medium and long term, with regard to sustainability, I think there will be (if it isn’t already open) a debate on the evaluation and reporting of sustainable practices. It will be necessary to define, on a sectoral basis, which good practices really contribute to the idea of sustainability, what incentives can be offered to accelerate change and, above all and for me most importantly, how to balance the idea of responsible production with the objectives of growth, increasing market share or profitability for a company listed on the stock exchange.

Share this article

Facebook-f Twitter Linkedin