Profile: Tim Lynch, Britvic

When he’s not using these materials to patch up an antique mirror for his Norfolk home, Lynch manages a team tasked with incorporating the bottle lids and self-adhesive labels into new designs for drinks brands such as Pepsi, Tango, Robinsons, Fruit Shoot and J2O. Much of the design is outsourced to agencies and it is part of Lynch’s job to ensure that the results integrate with innovative structural designs and cost-effective manufacturing solutions.

“In the last two years we’ve turned around the way Britvic works. The way they were doing things before was fine, but it was a process managed by only two guys, who had to make the whole thing work,” he says. “I’m very much in favour of process and order because I believe that, when you’ve got order, it allows you to experiment. When everything’s ticking along fine, you’ve got the freedom to tackle issues when they crop up.” So order is what he implemented.

Goal-oriented
A goal is the first part of Lynch’s three-step working process. “I think good design has to start with some goal,” he explains. “You have to know where you’re going. It’s got to contain, protect and identify, that’s a given. But then good design has got to go that bit further. Once you have a goal, you can create a brief. If you’re asking people to work with you, you’ve got to give them something to work towards.”

The second step is to assemble a team and the third is working as a team member and compromising, “but not too much”, warns Lynch. “Everybody’s got to have some say, but there’s a happy medium to be found. You can give up too much and end up with packaging that doesn’t satisfy anybody.”

Design isn’t Lynch’s only responsibility: “My job is 80 per cent artwork and 20 per cent pack development. Now that we’ve got the artwork team under control, we expect to work much more with the innovation and marketing teams. You can’t really develop a bottle in isolation from the decoration.”

Lynch has recently enjoyed working as part of a cross-industry group, headed up by the British Soft Drinks Association to improve the communication of guideline daily amounts on drinks packs.

Considerations about the minimum size of statutory text increasing from six to eight or 10 point in the future, he says, means he’ll have to work with pack designers to incorporate these substantially larger messages onto bigger or differently shaped bottles, rather than focusing on designing artwork that includes them.

His summary of what struck him as important about the discussions suggests a highly organised individual: “The important thing for me was consensus and continuity”, he says. Just as well, because Britvic has launched 11 new brands, 42 flavours and formulations and 23 new packaging innovations in the last eight years and Lynch has got to keep an eye on a roster of 1,200 artwork changes/year.

One recent example of artwork development has been for the so-called “better for you” carbonated drinks sector. Britvic made two additions to its Tango Clear range in the summer, with striking on-pack graphics for clear bottles. The refreshed and simplified labelling aimed to enhance on-shelf impact and caught the attention of health-conscious fizzy drinkers, with larger type used to highlight the ‘no added sugar’ message.

Building brand equity
“Britvic is only brands. We don’t manufacture any own-label products at all,” says Lynch. As such, having a constantly changing design portfolio is vital to Britvic’s success or failure. “Everything we do is brand-focused. It’s all about building equity in the brand.”

It’s this brand equity that attracted Lynch to Britvic. After years of living away from home during the week and a stint in America as consultant to Cadbury Schweppes, he was glad to find a job nearer home. But it wasn’t just an easier life that he was after. Britvic offered Lynch the chance to make an impact with design: “Britvic was offering all the big brands and I love being associated with big brands. One of the reasons I love packaging so much is the ability to create something and leave your mark.”

Top five projects
- Britvic Fruit Shoot H20: Cool design, a combination of top-notch printing, invisible labels and clear PET
- The McDonald’s Happy Meal carton: An intense investigation that gave us an insight into what packaging had to do with delivering brand-promise
- Profit-improvement on a Cadbury US beverage case: Gapping the flaps by just 50mm gave a $850,000 saving
- The alternative to the boring sandwich clamshell at McDonald’s: This was the best, and worst, project I’ve ever worked on. We developed a revolutionary solution and planned a series of evolutionary steps into something that was so radical, McDonald’s killed it
- The challenge of developing a carton containing one 5ml ampoule that would survive the Transport of Dangerous Goods Regulations tests: Now that was overpackaging!

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