INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Josh Gross is the managing partner at digital product studio Planetary and its child company, Regular, the low-cost, high quality studio
for small businesses. Do you remember as a kid going to the grocery store with your parents and being just totally overwhelmed by the
bright, loud packaging of products on shelf after shelf, aisle after aisle?I certainly do
Each product had a brand — you’d recognize the Kix by its bright red box and Tide by its loud orange bottle
Every package screamed its brand name at you.Branded packaging as we know it hasn’t been around that long
While people have been packaging goods for millennia, trademarked printed boxes, tins and shrink-wrapped containers were only invented in
the late 1800s — less than 150 years ago, beginning with Uneeda Biscuits around 1896.When branded packaging was invented, and up until
very recently, its purpose and value to nearly every industry made a ton of good sense
The average consumer would shop in a catalog, browsing ads and offerings, or in a store, perusing shelves of products
The more a product stood out and set itself apart, the more memorable it would be and the more likely it would be purchased
Good packaging made products easy to recommend and spread by sharing visually.And then, the internet came along.Our team recently launched
our new studio product, Regular, a service directed at small businesses hitting their growth inflection point
As we began to design our own website and work on branding, we did a lot of research into branding trends for consumer packaged goods, and
what we uncovered was surprising.We found was that there is a surprising movement towards “unbranding” — specifically choosing not to
create a strong association between a product and its maker
Instead of bright packaging, large logos and stamped products, many companies are now going the other direction by operating without logos
and offering minimal (or no) packaging.Pens from MUJI (Photo: Michael/Flickr)One of the earliest companies to adopt this mindset was
Japanese home goods store MUJI, whose name literally means “No Brand” (it doesn’t get more literal than that)
Most of its products come unpackaged with just a small price tag, or in minimal packaging with a single informational label (e.g.,
“lotion,” “body soap”) to identify its contents.But MUJI has been since the 1980s, so why are we talking about this now?
