You have a Start-up? Prepare yourself: Mistakes Happen… We made one!

You have a Start-up? Prepare yourself: Mistakes Happen… We made one!

You have a Start-up? Prepare yourself: Mistakes Happen… We made one!

How many times have people asked, how do you avoid mistakes?

As my friend Brad Woodgate shares regularly on his Linkedin: mistakes and even failures will happen!

Start-ups move fast. Way faster than big CPGs. That’s one of our competitive advantages!

We see trends, we have ideas. Often we don’t have years of big corporate experience and hundreds of thousands dollars in research budgets or dozen and dozens of teams of functional experts.

So we must always have our eyes on the market, on our brand, on our consumers and retailers … all day long!

Quick fixes and perseverance are the keys to breaking through.

Here’s ours:

Last year we moved fast to launch 2 unique, disruptive family lines of products each in Canada and the US.  The Better Chocolate

15 skus…fast! 

We’re FIRST to market in Canada with the new Supplemented Food Facts panels from Health Canada.

However, I quickly realized over Christmas that the packaging of our Functional Snacks Chocolates was good but not strong enough.

For lots of reasons I knew we could do better.

I had just re-connected with Anne Marie Pagliacci , the President of invōk brands whom I worked with for years, and value and trust so much. 

She said “you can do better- let us help!”

We had to try.

Well we moved fast with great creative and designers. We met in person, our Packaging Brief was clear and tight and the team was energized.

We also reached out to two other graphic designers. Everyone working furiously and together towards our very tight deadline to get boxes printed in time for our next production (in March), to deliver on very tight deadlines to get into stores.

Go Go Go!

We did research - went in a wrong direction, got more feedback and finally, nailed it. 

A big big thanks to everyone who helped along the way. 

We now have work to do to RE-PACK our white boxes into our new design.

We’re on it. Thanks to everyone who is quoting our RFP. 

Much appreciated.

Have a look at our Before & After

Before is the white and red packaging

After is the pastel colours and stronger appetite appeal. Younger and more modern too 🙌
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