London Packaging Week: Understanding the market and leading the conversation

London Packaging Week brings together the industry’s 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.

Markets rarely shift in neat, declared moments. They accumulate pressure quietly, through changing expectations, subtle cultural corrections, and the growing friction between what brands want to say and what audiences are willing to believe. Packaging sits directly in that tension: part signal, part system, part cultural object. And it is within this evolving landscape that London Packaging Week 2026 (16 & 17 September, Halls S2 & S3, Excel London) reflects the scale and intensity of an industry actively redefining how packaging is designed, experienced and commercialised.

For Kelly Dawson, Co-Founder & 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 explains. “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.”

That response is increasingly complex. In categories where shelf noise is intensifying and digital discovery is reshaping physical purchase decisions, clarity has become a competitive advantage. Yet clarity alone is no longer enough.

Kelly continues: “The most effective packaging today doesn’t just communicate, it interprets. It translates cultural signals into something immediate and understandable. That’s where leadership in design really sits now.”

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.”

Coherence as an advantage

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 says. “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.”

That sense of return is not accidental. It is built through consistency, through systems that extend rather than fragment identity.

“Every project begins by building or extending a brand’s world,” Gaby adds. “This gives every execution a logical home: nothing feels bolted on. It creates the consistency that earns instinctive trust, and the room to grow without the costly identity crises that so often come with scale.”

In a crowded marketplace, Gaby argues, attention is no longer won by escalation. It is earned by coherence.

“Shouting louder is a strategy that rarely wins,” she says. “We focus on building worlds, strategic and creative spaces designed to attract attention rather than compete for it.”

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 explains. “This shift is largely driven by saturation. Beauty, like many categories, has become intensely crowded, both on shelf and in the scroll.”

In that environment, he argues, differentiation cannot rely solely on graphics.

“While graphic design remains important, it can only do so much when formats and pack types are fundamentally the same. That’s where structure becomes a powerful differentiator. The silhouette of a pack, its form, proportion, and physical presence, can create immediate recognition and memorability, often before branding or messaging is even processed.”

The intelligence of less

If Kelly defines the market reading, Gaby defines the emotional architecture of response, and Nick introduces structural differentiation as a physical advantage. Lisa Cain, Technical Lead – Food, Confectionery & Premium Drinks at Smurfit WestRock, brings the necessary systems discipline to hold it all in place.

“The market is forcing brands to confront what is real versus what is excess,” Lisa explains. “Packaging is often where that tension becomes visible first.”

There is a discipline in restraint that she returns to repeatedly, not as an aesthetic preference, but as a systems requirement.

“We’ve spent years adding layers — more finishes, more complexity, more justification,” she says. “But increasingly, value is being redefined by what you remove rather than what you add.”

That shift has implications beyond design language. It reshapes production logic, material choice, and the commercial viability of packaging decisions.

“Good packaging doesn’t just look resolved,” Lisa adds. “It is a system that makes sense commercially, environmentally, and operationally. If one of those fails, the rest becomes fragile.”

That discipline, however, requires precision because reduction without understanding can erode value just as quickly as excess can obscure it.

As Jo Smith reflects, “when you remove detail, you can start to unravel the experience.”

Nick’s perspective also extends into the sensory dimension of packaging, where differentiation is increasingly achieved through tactility and finish rather than form alone.

“We’re seeing brands invest more deliberately in elevated finishes and crafted details to create richer, more memorable experiences,” he explains. “Techniques such as embossing and debossing, interior carton printing, and tactile coatings are subtle but powerful interventions that reward interaction and encourage deeper engagement.”

He adds that this shift is being driven by the same underlying force as structural innovation: saturation.

“As categories become increasingly saturated, brands are looking beyond surface-level graphics to create moments of discovery and delight through touch and materiality. These sensorial cues can significantly enhance perceived value and emotional connection.”

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 says. “We design with manufacturing, logistics and reality in the room from the start.”

This proximity to execution is not a constraint; it is a filter for seriousness.

Sometimes, as Jo Smith observes, “it’s the execution of the idea, not the idea itself, that fails.”

Which is why the role of design leadership is not to choose between creativity and constraint, but to ensure neither is lost in the process.

“The strongest ideas are the ones that survive contact with reality,” Sasha explains. “Constraint isn’t where ideas get reduced. It’s where they become precise enough to matter.”

In practice, that means removing the gap between conception and production.

“When something isn’t working, everyone knows immediately,” he says. “There’s no layering of interpretation across teams. That directness protects the integrity of the idea.”

The discipline of clarity

There is a temptation, in any crowded market, to believe that clarity comes from simplification. But clarity is not the absence of complexity. It is the ability to hold it without distortion.

The most effective work rarely presents itself as innovation. It tends to arrive with a sense of inevitability, as though no other version would quite make sense. It earns attention not by escalation, but by alignment among structure, story, material, and intent.

It is also a question of leadership. Not loud, performative decision-making, but the quieter ability to hold direction under pressure.

“Real creative bravery is a commitment,” Jo Smith notes. “It’s knowing your assets so well that you can flex them without losing them.”

And increasingly, that alignment is being shaped before a word is even read. In form. In surface. In the quiet decisions that determine whether something is noticed, held, or passed over.

Leadership in packaging is therefore shifting away from expression alone, and towards orchestration of structure, sensation, and meaning in equal measure.

What remains is not louder. Just more resolved — and increasingly shaped in the spaces where scale, scrutiny and decision-making converge, such as London Packaging Week 2026.

www.londonpackagingweek.com