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A life in packaging

It was 48 years ago that I walked into an office in London’s West End to begin my first job in packaging.

Pw 1943 Cox Graham

In many organizations, people were addressed by surnames only. The more respected ones maybe got a “Mister” in front of it, and addressing superiors as “Sir” was still commonplace. It was three or four years later when the use of first names became the norm.

I had been working for a major UK brand owner in their company insurance function, and with each day being much like the one before it, I soon got bored. Eventually, the experts decided that purchasing was my future and persuaded the packaging buying department to take me on. And there it was, the start of a 48-year career that would ultimately see me working in more than 60 countries. It’s a thought that would have caused much hilarity on my first day!

Was packaging in the 60s different? Let’s just say we were still several years away from the first bar code (Wrigley’s gum by the way), “digital” was a word used by doctors only, and computers—which were bigger than huge refrigerators—had barely begun. So there were no emails (happy days!), not even any fax machines, and even the receipt of a thing called a telex created considerable excitement. Brand managers at the time knew even less about printing and packaging than they do now, and of course the word “environment” was nothing more than a reference to the sort of area in which we lived.

So how did a printed package get developed back then? Advertising agencies were involved as they are now. But they hadn’t progressed to giving themselves grand titles such as Brand Consultancy. They would be briefed on the package design requirements, resulting in the production of color visuals executed by hand. This was followed by hand drawn and pasted black-and-white artwork for further approval (remember, no computer or digital facilities). Print origination on the same basis was slow, so we waited several weeks for proofs and—inevitably—reproofs before an approval was given to go to production origination. That’s where final printing plates or stereos (made of great lumps of metal) also took a few more weeks. And just think about how we communicated back then. Everything in the run-up was carried by hand, as even motorcycle couriers didn’t yet exist. In fact, in my first few months in that first job, much time was spent on red London buses delivering proofs to brand managers or collecting artwork for the next item. So time to market was often lengthy, and even the most basic design change (maybe a revision to name/address wording) delayed a project. The upside was that no one had to include information like ingredients or calorie details, and foreign language wording was never contemplated, so at least there was less to get wrong.

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