When I was a little, nothing excited me more than packaging-texture, smell, colour, all of it, and as an adult, designing it for our range, I am still happily fascinated!!

My first (?) memory was when I was about 4 ( in 1960…gasp!!!) the fabulous slippery, crunchy, thick greaseproof paper with great retro typography ( yes I was a type nerd even then it seems!) around the blocks of salt that my grandmother bought, and stashed in a large earthenware jar, used for cooking and for the table. I was given a blunt kitchen knife and was allowed to spend hours carving shapes into the snowy white,curiously moist crystalline block before crumbling the satisfying mess into the jar.

Supermarket shopping didn’t really exist then, but I remember going to the Home and Colonial stores( forerunner of Sainsbury’s as it is now in the UK) where I was just level with the marble counter, and marvelled at the massive cheeses
( with real rinds) on display. All the tinned goods  sat in serried displays against  the wall…you asked for what you wanted cut and it was wrapped carefully in greaseproof paper and into my nan’s (woven material not plastic) shopping bag to be carried home.

Once unwrapped all the paper wrapping was then carefully smoothed out for use in baking, or rewrapping, and the string reused in the garden, as we grew all our own vegetables. The salt paper was deemed to be a fabulously noisy crow scarer apparently, since I always saw it flapping in the wind over the pea patch, in strings along with washed out tin cans tinkling away.

How times have changed! Despite the move to chemical free and skincare which I am proud to say that we pioneered in Tasmania, being the very first brand established here 18 years ago, I must say I laugh like a drain when I see all the “organic” brands out there who claim to be whiter than white,totally pure with no petrochemicals in it…in…er….plastic packaging, which is made of – yep – petrochemicals!! I simply cannot grasp this ethical/environmental mismatch, and we yet are continually explaining our own choice of eco-friendly brown recycleable glass, paper and tin packaging, because it is seen as not as “user friendly and convenient” as plastic ( !!!) despite the myriad reports of country sized rafts of plastic bottles clogging the oceans, and plastic being massively publicised as the number one environmental curse.

Worse, plastic has been proven to leaks endocrine disrupting chemicals into products ( we were telling people this 10 years ago but people glazed over) but all of this is disregarded because the pack “looks good” or is convenient to squeeze.

Dealing with clients, we scratch our heads at the desire for squeaky clean products, yet the willingness to buy acres of plastic packaging that it comes in, can anyone out there explain this? I know that we buy with our eyes, but conscience override seems to come into play too I guess.

Australia is in fact the worst place in the world to be a small manufacturer, because it is the hardest place in the world to source ethically sound packaging, due to our small population and hence small consumer demand.

Indeed we took part in a webinar recently about going into the Asian marketplace, and the single most interesting point was that Australian skincare is regarded as some of the cleanest and safest in the world BUT that the packaging was very poor.

That comes back, once again, to the miniscule size of the market in Australia- packaging supply companies have to eat too, so will only bring in what they are guaranteed to sell, or you need to order 10,000 of one kind which is beyond the reach of the average small business….so the spiral is complete….the fabulous designer packaging can only be accessed by the massive multinationals, but even then, they still choose plastic, driven by consumers.

Confused? So are we.

We’ll just stick to our good old fashioned, eco friendly glass, recycled paper and cardboard, and get creative as we have for the last 18 years and make it look as good as we can…..but it’s funny, we are seeing everyone doing the same….so we must be doing something right!