Colloquia

Summary

This research is executed for Pavo, a company that sells horse feed. The focus of the project is on sending large bulk products in the market of e-commerce. The company wants to know whether the current way of sending products can be optimized. The current packaging consists of large feed bags of 15 or 20 kilos which are manually put into large expensive corrugated boxes. The box is sent to customers by parcel delivery companies. However, a horse consumes large volumes, so the customer orders more than one package of feed at a time. The result is that the customer is left with a lot of boxes to throw away.

In addition, Pavo and the analysis showed that there are more issues that can be improved:
- The package is large and clumsy to handle
- Costs of the extra packages for sending reduce the sales margins
- The large box is not convenient in use, for packer, transporter and user
- The package solution can possibly be made more sustainable

By means of the market, product and environmental analysis, the mentioned issues are translated into requirements which are incorporated into a program of demands. Subsequently, these requirements are used to support the design process for a new optimal shipping packaging. The design process is executed by means of a circular economy analysis, a brainstorm is used to find new solutions and a morphological diagram is used to structure the ideas. This finally resulted in 10 new packaging concepts, which are stepwise reduced to three concepts in cooperation with Pavo. The three concepts are further elaborated and prototyped.

A survey is held among customers from Pavo who frequently buys horse feed online. They are asked to give feedback on the concepts and which concept they like to see implemented. The concepts are also physically tested to make sure they are suitable to be sent as a package without extra packaging material to be added. Finally, the concepts are tested against the formulated requirements. All the results were evaluated and one concept was chosen to be explored further. As a final step, the concept is detailed on the base of possible obstacles that were defined during the judgement on the base of the requirements. The final detailed concept is a proposal to Pavo to take up in their packaging portfolio for e-commerce.