Teardown

Six packaging systems that survived a supermarket shelf

Photographed under the actual lighting, at the actual distance, next to the actual competition.

11 min · Paris

Packaging is approved in a meeting room at forty centimetres and sold in an aisle at two metres under lighting nobody chose. We photographed six systems in the second condition.

The survivors share one property: a single high-contrast element that holds at two metres, whether that is a mark, a band or an unbroken field of one colour. Everything the designers were proudest of operates below a metre.

Three of the six failed a simpler test — they were indistinguishable from the private label sitting directly beneath them, which had copied the shelf logic faithfully and the brand not at all.

Reported by the CliqueTrees newsroom. Corrections run at the top of the following edition, set in the same size as the mistake.