Puma's Clever Little Bag (made from recycled PET) gives boot to shoebox

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Jill Park, Packaging News, 05 May 2010
After 21 months and 2,000 prototypes, the sportswear giant has unveiled its vision for the future of shoe packaging. Jill Park talks to renowned industrial designer and brains behind the project, Yves Behar

Sportswear giant Puma caught the attention of the packaging world last month when it announced it would overhaul its packaging - starting with the traditional shoe box - in line with its new mission statement to be "the most desirable and sustainable sports lifestyle brand".
Overhauling such an established form of packaging was never going to be a simple task. Puma wisely turned to San Francisco-based industrial designer Yves Behar to tackle the project. Twenty-one months and over 2,000 iterations later, the Clever Little Bag was born.
The Clever Little Bag is made from recycled PET and is designed to function as retail packaging for the shoes and as a take-home bag for the customer. A pulp frame was one of the ideas considered, but Behar's final design focused on a bag and a cardboard insert.

"It's clever because it uses just a single sheet of cardboard and the bag fits the structure," says Behar. "You can just remove that piece of cardboard in the retail outlet and the bag replaces the shopping bag."
According to Puma, the move will reduce paper consumption by 65%, save 20 million megajoules of electricity and 275 tonnes of plastic per year.
"The only way to justify a large change, I'm certain, was to have a project that would have a big impact -that would really be game-changing for the company," says Behar.
One step beyond
"We looked at different ways of dealing with the cardboard and folding it, but then we realised it was just incremental and maybe we could do more."
Throughout the process Behar was engaged with Puma's logistics teams and his resulting pack has been tested throughout the supply chain to ensure it works in places with established infrastructures and those with less well-established ones.
Implementing such a radical step change in packaging meant getting all parts of the supply chain on board.
"I would say people became more and more open to the idea when they saw the radical savings and the radical ways in which this project was going to save millions of pounds' worth of cardboard," says Behar of the challenge.
However, his work is not restricted to shoe boxes. He has also addressed other forms of Puma's packaging. The company's T-shirts, for example, will be folded smaller to reduce the amount of packaging required and PLA bags are being explored.
Sustainability is indeed a key issue for the Germany-based company, whose headquarters are run on green electricity and whose mission statement has now been adapted to read "to be the most desirable and sustainable sports lifestyle brand".
Brave move
Behar was an obvious choice for the project. His background involves quirky packaging projects for companies such as Y-Water, whose Y-shaped bottles are able to be interlinked with other bottles as a toy for children. Another packaging project saw Behar's company Fuseproject design a condom pack for New York's Department of Health for distribution across the city.
However, most will know Behar as the designer behind the white and green XO Laptop created for the One Laptop Per Child project, the $100 laptop specifically adapted to children and their environment. "We do a lot of packaging projects," says Behar, who likes to design both products and their packaging, taking into consideration their "entire eco-system".
"Packaging for me is very strategic," he says. "Sustainability is often seen as a place where products get stuck, but for me it was a great opportunity," he says. "It takes courage for a firm like Puma to reinvent itself, reinvent things that, initially, the consumer doesn't even see or realise is there."
Behar explains that his background in industrial design feeds his packaging designs by exposing him to new materials and a lateral approach to projects. "Most of the packaging we see out there is often graphic design. I like to look at the structural and brand side all at the same time and I think this is where we find the big innovations."
Puma's packaging certainly stands out from the crowd, but what if other companies want to follow suit? Puma chief executive Jochen Zeitz admits the company has a patent pending on the design, but is open to speaking to other companies interested in using the format. Potentially the shoe box as we know it could be a thing of the past.