There are many unmet consumer needs and areas for improvement in the pet packaging space. We’ve previously discussed the prominent pain points of this industry, and we walked through potential opportunities.

While our ultimate goal is to find solutions to our customers’ (consumers and retailers) challenges, it’s important to explain our process of getting there. At Ring Container Technologies, we offer two types of innovation services, Consumer Insight Sprints and Bottle Design Sprints.

Our Consumer Insight Sprints use design thinking methodologies to develop ideas into testable prototypes. We recommend this innovation service when your team is looking for richer insights and strategic guidance on packaging opportunities. As the word “sprint” implies, these are microbursts of powerful, directional research.

Bottle Design Sprints bring dozens of bottle designs to life in a single day. In addition to quickly producing outstanding cutting-edge designs, these sprints are tethered to the realities of manufacturing and supply chain optimization. We recommend this innovation service when your team already has the key insights to direct a design exercise and needs a super-charged method to go from concept to final design in a short period of time.

In the case of our pet parenting deep dive, we engaged in a Consumer Insight Sprint to understand what pet parents are really looking for in pet packaging.

Our design thinking methodologies included:

• 20+ Ring professionals

• Five innovation moderators

• In-home, in-store, focus groups and pet park interviews

• 30+ consumers on-site, plus dozens of field interviews

• 800+ refined prototypes tested with customers

Through this collaborative approach, we were able to find a deeper and broader understanding of pet parents and potential customers’ packaging concerns. This led to the inspiration for differentiated solutions that can displace existing pet packaging and increase market share.

In this series of blog posts, we’re talking about our collaborative approach to find packaging solutions for our customers in the pet industry. If this blog series inspires you to collaborate on new packaging, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us today.