Sometimes, packaging arbitrage is the raison d’être for a whole company. Dollar Shave Club, the direct-to-consumer start-up, didn’t make or even design its own razors. Instead, it bought inexpensive ones from the Korean brand Dorco, wrapped them in slick, Millennial-bait branding, and found a sector of the market that hadn’t yet been spoken to by the old guard of Schick and Gillette. In 2016, Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club for a reported price tag of $1 billion.
Carefully considered packaging is one way new brands can claw market share away from existing juggernauts, Samantha Bergeron, the owner of Uncover Research, told me. Her firm helps clients such as Target and Amazon measure consumer sentiment toward new products and concepts, including how the minute details of packaging design influence shoppers’ thoughts and choices. There’s not much genuinely new under the sun, but some things can be made to look new in compelling ways.
Bergeron singled out the cleaning-products brand Method, which hit the market in 2001, as a prime example of the difference that appearance can make for even the most quotidian goods. In a grocery-store aisle dominated by the opaque white, silver, and blue bottles—the colors of cleanliness!—that bear generations-old names such as Clorox and Lysol, Method was “packaged beautifully and became a sensation,” she told me. Even if you’re not familiar with the brand name, you’d likely recognize its super-simple clear-plastic bottles, most of which hold soaps and cleaners in cheerful shades of pink, purple, orange, green, or blue. At a time when many shoppers were beginning to be suspicious about the vague scourge of “chemicals” and search for more eco-friendly cleaning supplies, Method responded to their concerns and, perhaps more important, looked like it did, too—the bottles are, quite literally, transparent.
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