The first year of the Pentawards Festival X Paris Packaging Week has come to an end and what a jam-packed, inspiring, impactful celebration of design it was!

If you missed it and want to find out what went down, we’ve put together some of our highlights from the Festival.

Designing with impact

With Designing with Impact being the overall theme for the festival, our speakers really leaned into this topic. From designing with experience in mind for large-scale brands to smaller agencies, from accessible design to storytelling, the experts really took a deep dive in to uncover what is making the industry tick.

Marie-Therese Cassidy VP Design, Europe at PepsiCo's talk about the rebrand of Pepsi after 14 years pulled in an incredible crowd. With impactful videos and insights on the epic experiences created for this relaunch -from Pepsi drone displays & ski parties to having fun with design and flavours, each creating a joyful vibe that makes you want to be part of the Pepsi journey.

And on the topic of impact, the impact of this brilliant community shone through throughout the two days, connecting, catching up, discovering and celebrating this wonderful industry.

Human-centric 

What really struck us about the talks on the Pentawards Stage was a human-centric theme coming through. Brands and designers are really thinking about connection, with consumers but also within their teams, how they should be creating authentic and empathetic experiences and moments for people through design.

Empathy was touched upon on a few talks from  Bruno Singulani, Global Design Director at Haleon highlighting how through creative empathy you can step into a consumers life to figure out their wants and needs, which Macarena Castillo Olmos, Senior Brand Design Manager at Colgate-Palmolive EU also highlighted as one of her 4 pillars of the ‘creative playground’. 

For Carrefour’s collaboration with the Paris Olympics, Tatiana Ryfer-Emberger, Global Brand Identity Director,  talked us through how they bring their branding and individuality through on a large scale. Pushing to have illustrations of people included – something the Olympics hasn’t done before – within the packaging to add another layer of connection.

Mayra Messora, Head of Design Brazil and Ximena O'Reilly Global Head of Design at Nestle talked about their internal and external collaboration, redefining their briefing strategy for the design and marketing teams as well as looking at designs and products based on connecting with the wants and needs of each market – operating in 188 countries, it’s no mean feat.

Friends Fe Amarante, Founder & Principal at Experimenta and Rebecca McCowan, Design Director at Coca-Cola took to the stage on day 2 with their eye-opening and honest chat outlining the 5 pillars of creativity – that work. Delivering a few home-truths about how often the ways of working for designers – meetings, exhaustion and juggling too much, are blocking the creative process.

Alongside this, AI and technology was still an important part of the conversation, as Marc Powell, Global Accessibility Centre of Excellence Lead at Unilever said in his talk about accessible packaging, ‘technology is a game changer’ for blind and partially sighted people, he showed a brilliant video by the RNIB displaying an experiment to reflect how difficult shopping can be for blind and partially sighted people. As well as how the brilliant accessibility QR code worked to aid those who are blind and partially sighted read labels– an inspiring man indeed.

ESG and Sustainability

ESG and Sustainability is at the heart of our events and of course on the minds of designers and brands alike and it's inspiring to see the packaging design industry leading the charge when it comes to sustainability innovation.

Diageo really are ahead of the game when it comes to sustainability. Jeremy Lindley, Global Design Director at Diageo discussed making sustainability more desirable when it comes to delivering luxury projects such as Johnnie Walker Blue Label Ultra - the world’s lightest 70cl Scotch Whisky glass bottle. As well as Michelle Atkinson, Senior Global Sustainability & Innovations Lead at Diageo talking us through the use and development of paper bottles, for whisky to baileys.

This was also particularly prevalent in not only the trends discussed by our own Jen Clements and Chloe Scanlan in their trend talk, but also in the panel discussion on day 2 with Curtis Ju, Founder and Global Initiative Director at K Laser Design Lab, John Glasgow, Co-Founder at Vault49, Sebastien Greffe, Creative Director at WeWantMore hosted by Uwe Melichar, Partner Europe, Touch & Vice-President, epda , on how designers have had to adapt and learn in regards to sustainability.

Innovation & collaboration

Our design agency exhibitors did a brilliant job of putting design at the forefront of the show, displaying their innovative and creative work, and discussing collaboration with brands and manufacturers, and in the case of the EPDA connecting and celebrating the European design community.

Our agencies also stepped on stage with panels on both day 1 (Agathe Vincent-Laÿ, Co-Founder and Director at Pantel, Guilhem Effroy, Managing Partner at extreme, Vincent Villeger Creative Director at VILLEGER, hosted by Annie Kuschel, Global Head of Design Management Packaging and Print at KURZ) and day 2 discussing trends, techniques, and challenges. Creating conversations and opening up on their thoughts about the future of the packaging design landscape and what they need to get creative.

With our networking session and in-between talks, there were a lot of conversations, ideas and introductions, it was so brilliant to see packaging and packaging design community coming together.

Inspiration & creativity

Our gallery of 100 packs provided opportunity for inspiration from the Pentawards 2024 winners. Across categories, countries and products, the breadth and creativity of these designs made for an impactful display.

Taking to the stage for our networking session powered by Tapi x Delage, Craig Black stole the show with his live art performance of ‘Acrylic Fusion’, displayed on Tapi’s closure and bottles creating unique, one-off pieces of art – and a buzz of entertainment for the festival.

A HUGE thank you to our exhibitors, speakers, headline sponsors Kurz and Paris Packaging Week for making this all possible – we had a blast! See you next year?