Business

Janet Shipton started her packaging career as a graduate at CarnaudMetalbox and then spent seven years at Boots, where she ended up managing its brand packaging and dealing with suppliers in the UK and the Far East. Before joining Chesapeake in March 2008, she spent eight years at Design Futures, the product and packaging design consultancy based at Sheffield Hallam University. In 2007, after six years of work, she completed her PhD on understanding domestic packaging reuse in the UK, and has used some of her spare time since then to learn to play the saxophone, as well as train for her second half-marathon.

Describe your new role
I'm responsible for creating innovative branded packaging working with the design teams and sales and marketing across our teams in Bradford, Scotland, Newcastle and Europe. I manage 12 staff in Bradford and four in Scotland.
Is most of your work reactive or proactive?

We do reactive work to customer briefs, but also proactive work so we need to have an understanding of consumer research. One of our aims is to get under the skin of our customers' customers. This includes a better understanding of consumers' perception of sustainability, and how they interact with packaging.

Is packaging innovation sufficiently consumer-focused?
We could do it better, but we also need a partnership approach with our clients. We need them to share their insights too. Real innovation comes out of working in partnership with clients.

What can the packaging industry learn from academia?
There's a lot of research that can be tapped in to and that's something I will be looking to do. Some of the research techniques I have learned will hopefully help in this role. Incorporating multi-disciplinary design work is relatively new to the sector, but it has been used for years in the automotive industry and product design. A lot of our work is about value engineering, not just reducing, reducing, reducing packaging.