15 ENTREVISTA I INTERVIEW website, content, communication, and events. Everything. The most revealing moment of this project came when the giant Unilever showed interest in acquiring the brand. During the negotiation process, we received direct feedback on the packaging: what worked and what needed to be more impactful to compete globally. We made adjustments, obviously. That conversation with one of the world’s largest consumer goods groups was the best validation that the decisions we had made were the right ones. Today, NOKU has eight flavors and is present in more than 10 countries with adaptations to the corresponding languages. A project where the order and coherence of the packaging system have been as important as creativity. What is the state of design in our country? There is a gap that is closing but still exists. Spanish food companies have significantly improved their understanding of brand value in recent years. More and more decisionmakers understand that packaging is not a production cost but a business investment. What is still lacking, in many cases, is understanding the difference between design and brand strategy. Design is commissioned when the problem is positioning. Packaging is changed when the problem is product range architecture. This confusion between symptom and cause is what causes many design investments to fail to produce the expected results. Design without strategy— with all that this implies in terms of positioning, target audience, distribution, and communication—is no longer enough. What trends are emerging in packaging design? Packaging trends have a problem: by the time they become visible, they’ve already arrived too late. The minimalism we see today saturating the shelves is a response to a trend from five years ago. What we observe in cutting-edge projects is a return to character. Brands that don’t try to please everyone, but rather precisely target their consumer. This is sometimes minimalist and sometimes expressive; it will depend on who the brand is, who the consumer is, and how they connect. In terms of materials, the direction is clear and irreversible. The question is no longer whether to incorporate sustainability criteria, but how to do so without compromising brand communication or the project’s economic viability. Do awards and international recognition help, or do they not have an economic return? We have two Pentawards and more than twenty national and local awards. And I have an honest answer about their true value. Awards provide security. For us as a team and for the client considering us. When someone arrives at Brandsummit without prior knowledge of us, knowing that our work has been internationally recognized reduces the friction in the decision-making process. But our main endorsement doesn’t come from awards. It comes from recommendations from other clients. That’s the most valuable return there is, and one that no award can replace. At the end of the first session, we always ask how they heard about us, and that’s a common answer. To what extent do new technologies like AI influence this? AI is changing the speed of execution, as it’s a very powerful tool. What used to require days of visual exploration can now be generated in hours. That has a real impact on how we work—it frees up time for what AI can’t do. And what AI can’t do is precisely the most valuable part of our work: understanding the business problem behind the project, questioning the brief, making strategic decisions the client hadn’t considered. AI executes. We decide what needs to be executed and why. I repeat, it’s a very powerful tool. And we use it extensively, in most phases of our own brand-building process. If AI has done anything for our positioning, it’s clarified it. In an industry where visual execution is becoming increasingly automated, prior strategy becomes more valuable, not less. What are your upcoming projects? We never discuss the brands we work with until they’re on the market, due to confidentiality and competitive considerations, so I won’t mention any brands. But currently, as a highlight, we’re working on an international project for a leading brand with a presence in more than 12 countries. The project includes over 30 packaging designs adapted to each market and language. Before making any design decisions, we interviewed key global distributors to understand how the product performs in each cultural context. We also worked directly with printers in each region to validate and standardize colors and quality, because a packaging solution that works in Spain might not be reproducible in another market. This type of project perfectly encapsulates what we do: the complexity lies not in the design itself, but in the preliminary decisions that ensure the design works in any context.
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