Wrapping and unwrapping: the unboxing phenomenon is at a turning point
As of this year, there is a law regulating the sustainability of packaging. In packaging, the aim now is to preserve the pleasure of the experience, without harming the environment.
When we unwrap a luxury garment in 2030, what will we touch, what will we have in our hands? The unboxing, for the fashion industry, is more than just the first touchpoint between brand and consumer, it is an integral part of an experience, it is the incipit of pleasure.
That pleasure has often been based on grand, rich, flashy packaging. Here, all this is set to change, is already changing, due to pressure from regulations, consumers and the planet. The basic premise is that this is an enormous challenge, because such are the global dimensions of the luxury packaging market: 17.6 billion dollars according to Euromonitor, to which Italy, a country of fashion and therefore of packaging, contributes a large slice: 1.3 billion. We are talking about 364 thousand tonnes of packaging. The laws are ready, in particular the European PPWR, i.e. the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, launched in 2025, which sets a series of very ambitious objectives for packaging, which will have to be recyclable and with a significant reduction in waste.
As Alessandra Alessi of the Istituto Italiano Imballaggio explains, 'at this point in the journey, the positive fact is that we know where we are going, the difficulty is that we still don't really know how to get there and, for this reason, we have created a technical commission at the Institute - called Luxury Packaging - which is responsible for drawing up guidelines for the environmental management of luxury packaging'.
This is the bar: for those who handle desire and experience in addition to the sale of a simple product, it will not be easy to adapt. Alessi adds, in fact, that the challenge of the coming years will be precisely to find "the balance between the allure of packaging and its sustainability, without losing quality and image". Among the trajectories we can expect will be less scenic volume, fewer fillers, smaller, lighter packaging, more similar in size to its contents. Ecological sobriety, however, does not mean that packaging will be reduced to pure functionality. "The two most important things will be the creativity of designers, which will experience an explosion in the coming years, and good cooperation with suppliers," Alessi concludes.
These are the findings of a study by Bain & Company in collaboration with Fedrigoni, a global manufacturer of speciality papers. It is one of the most extensive analyses conducted on the sector, with hundreds of experts consulted worldwide. Thirty per cent of the designers surveyed agreed that the wave of sustainable change in luxury packaging will be strong and will become a reality within the next three years. The priorities, according to the experts, are weight and volume reduction, reuse of packaging, use of strong and lightweight materials, and modular designs. Among the most striking innovations are innovation in materials and the hybridisation of physical and digital. On the first front, start-ups and companies are proposing boxes and packages derived from mushroom mycelia, agricultural waste. These new high-tech biological fibres make it possible to have ecological, resistant, compostable packaging, an alternative to plastics, perfect for the luxury sector for both the tactile experience and the strength of the material, capable of protecting valuable products.
