E-Commerce & Corrugated Packaging Post COVID-19

AICC, The Independent Packaging Association, with the support of HP, brought members a free webinar, E-Commerce & Corrugated Packaging Post COVID-19, on June 15. Presenters Ron Sasine, Principal, Hudson Windsor LLC, and Ted Samotis, Director of Go-To-Market, HP PageWide Industrial Corrugated, HP, shared their insights about e-commerce, digital printing, and new opportunities. Panelist Mark Mathes, CEO, Vanguard Packaging, and Louie DeJesus, Owner, CompanyBox, also shared some of the secrets to their success.

“We’re glad to provide AICC members, converters and brands, HP’s professional knowledge, to better embrace e-commerce opportunities with digital corrugated presses,” said Sharon Chesler, Marketing Manager, HP PWI Corrugated. “With HP PageWide customer panel discussion, this webinar became a live platform for Q&A by attendees to industry experts like Vanguard Packaging and CompanyBox.”

At the beginning of the webinar, Sasine shared several statistics about the e-commerce market, including “e-commerce of consumer packaged goods totals $36 billion and is growing at 5x the growth rate of conventional retail.”

He noted, “we saw declines in the early parts of this year, and we will continue to see some declines across the broader corrugated market, but there are opportunities and windows of growth within that declining segment over the next year or 18 months…That means we will face challenges, and those who are equipped will succeed.”

He went on to discuss e-commerce consumer trends and the growth of customization and the continued move away from standardization. The ability to customize and provide additional value to customers is one of the “windows.”

Sasine said, “customization creates opportunities at different places in the supply chain. In the digital print world, we will see expanded offerings, touching both high-volume and low volume prices allows for extreme quality in the print and variability, changeovers…There is a massive opportunity in digital simplicity. There is also a massive opportunity in logistics and tracking with tied-to-data management.”

Later in the webinar, Mathes, using an example from Vanguard, showed how they had used tied-to-data management as one part of a packaging overhaul they lead for a customer. To better understand the customer, Mathes ordered one of their products, a pair of hunting boots, and then analyzed the packaging it came in to see how they could take that packaging and emulate the experience of buying it in a store.