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How Online Shopping Will Change the Shape of Bottles

“Shelf presence” has driven the design of bottles for decades. That’s because consumer product bottles were traditionally sold on store shelves, as discussed in the previous entry on this topic. But now that online shopping is growing exponentially, bottle designs are changing to meet the very different needs of e-commerce.

Once shelf presence is removed from the equation, designers can now focus more on efficiency, as seen with Proctor & Gamble’s new Tide Eco-Box for e-commerce. Since consumers aren’t picking these off of a store shelf but have ordered them online, all the packaging needs to do is store the maximum amount of liquid using the smallest amount of packaging materials that will get the contents there safely, and be functional in the end user’s laundry routine.

“Products sold online typically need to be packaged with a second or third layer of packaging like cardboard boxing and bubble wrap that’s then discarded by the consumer. To address this, P&G designed the Tide Eco-Box to ship as efficiently as possible on its journey from a manufacturing site to a retailer’s warehouse to a consumer’s front door.”

“The Tide Eco-Box arrives on a shopper’s doorstep in a sealed, shipping-safe cardboard box. Inside the box is a sealed bag of ultra-compacted Tide liquid laundry detergent. To use, a perforated cardboard flap is peeled off to reveal a dosing cup and a new "no-drip” twist tap. To make dosing simpler on flat surfaces, the box includes a pull-out stand to raise the height of the box so the cup fits easily beneath the tap.“

I guess it’s good that I got in the work experience I did with structural package design prior to this development. If all of my former employer’s products were sold this way, I estimate that me and at least two other guys in the department would not have had jobs. Designing a cardboard box, and using what’s probably an off-the-shelf Doi pack inside, would not have required the manpower of what was already a small team of designers.

h/t Gizmodo