Rita Sellers, founder and director of pH Factor, spoke to a packed audience on the ecoporium by Ball & Doggett stand about the challenges the industry faces in the personal care and homecare sectors.
According to Sellers, the beauty industry in Australia is valued around $11.2 billion, while globally it's $55.37 billion. It is also a heavily oversaturated market, with Sellers revealing that on the website Mecca, there are currently 413 results just for the term “moisturiser”. In this light, packaging is the key to ensuring your brand stands out amongst the competition.
Another challenge Sellers highlighted, aside from standing out, is the functionality of the packaging materials. She said: "Aside from the obvious, such as ensuring a mister actually produces a mist and not a squirt, brands also need to consider things such as how long would their product be sitting on the shelf? During the process of shipping, how long would it be sat in a container in a hot warehouse? So the packaging material needs to be able to handle changes in climate and give the product inside adequate protection."
The choice of packaging material also needs to be compatible with the chemical composition of the product inside. Sellers said that it’s no good if the material would react with, say, an organic compound contained within a cosmetic product.
When it comes to sustainability, one topic that is not talked about, she said, is that packaging suppliers often have huge minimum order requirements. This can lead to waste, as material ends up not being used, or passing its expiry date if the brand does not have enough movement of product to fulfill that. “Nobody wants to talk about this, but it gets dumped”, she emphasised.
