How Does Packaging Design Create Value? Japanese Designer Yuji Tokuda Says It Still Comes Down to Telling a Good Story

What kind of information is hidden underneath a good design — and how do you find it and distill it?

To the Japanese designer Yuji Tokuda, design is the story that connects a product to the people who buy it. And a designer who wants to be a storyteller has to keep changing with the times. Only then does the design move anyone.

Tokuda's career began the day he graduated from the Department of Visual Communication Design at Musashino Art University. He joined Dentsu in Japan and stayed nearly 15 years, with a detour of a little over a year at the Dutch agency KesselsKramer before returning home. In 2007, when he judged the timing "ripe," he opened his own design studio, canaria.

In the decade and more since, Tokuda's work has run from product packaging to advertising films, and has won more than 60 design prizes in Japan and abroad. canaria's staff only grew to 15 people last year, yet the studio finishes more than 100 design projects annually for clients across very different industries — beverage makers, restaurants, cosmetics brands, even massage salons.

We met Tokuda in April at the FBIF2018 Food and Beverage Innovation Forum in Shanghai. "There is no design I can't do," he said.

"If a designer wants to tell a good story, what matters is not just the product's color and shape but its philosophy," Tokuda said. By philosophy he means the product's characteristics, the maker's thinking and attitude toward the work, and — if the maker is a company — the founder's philosophy, the state of the competition, and insight into consumers.

Ask him how his working method took shape and he points to the year in the Netherlands, which changed a great deal: both the way he understands things and the way he talks business with clients. "In the Netherlands, before we ever got to the plan, we would go back to the client again and again to confirm: what is essential? Where are the gaps? Only once the goal was clear did we discuss the design."

He also came to understand design more deeply. "Taste and design skill come easily after two or three years of doing the work, but that is only the surface. What kind of information is actually hidden underneath a good design, and how you find it and distill it — that has everything to do with your experience and how much you have seen."

When canaria started up in 2008, Tokuda's clients were mostly friends he had met through earlier jobs. He got lucky the next year with a big account — designing ilohas mineral water for Coca-Cola — and that bottle is what finally made his name in the industry.

Tokuda splits his design work into two stages: "sorting out" and "making visible." The designer proposes colors and shapes and uses the sorting-out stage to fix the standard, while also watching the marketing side and using instinct to catch what consumers are really after. Only then does he take on everything else — packaging material, logo, visual appeal, the shop floor where the product will be sold — and turn it into something you can see.

At the time, mineral water everywhere was sold on the natural setting of its source. Japanese water is drawn from all over the country, and there are so many sources with superb natural conditions that no single source could stand out on that claim. Coca-Cola wanted to launch a completely new mineral water in Japan, and handed canaria the whole job: concept, development, packaging and advertising.

Could the rules of the game in mineral water design be changed? Tokuda turned instead to a new kind of consumer awareness, hoping to find something there that would let him make a mineral water unlike any before it.

What he found was that consumer environmentalism had become the topic marketers were talking about. By 2009, 90% of Japanese people held favorable views of environmental protection, but only 10% actually did anything about it. That left 80% who cared but had not yet acted.

After studying how that group behaved and why, and talking it through with other designers, Tokuda settled on a green bottle and label design that cut crude oil use. Producing a 500ml plastic bottle in Japan normally takes 20 milligrams of crude oil; Tokuda's bottle needed only 12 to 13.

The eco bottle was softer and thinner, weighed only 60% as much as an ordinary plastic bottle, and could be wrung up like a rag, saving space in the recycling bin. When he first presented it, nobody liked it. "Everyone thought it was a failure. As a product, it looked extremely flimsy," Tokuda said.

The selling point of ilohas moved from the water source to the environment, and the label followed: it shrank, and took on a yellow-green pinwheel pattern that stood for the bottle in its wrung-up state — which also set it apart from the pink-and-blue labels then in fashion.

Environmental awareness shaped the advertising too. In the commercial the Japanese actor Hiroshi Abe shot for ilohas, he demonstrates three steps: choose ilohas, drink it, wring the bottle. In the last shot he holds up a sign: water that can change the world, just like this.

Even Tokuda did not expect that a twistable plastic bottle would set off so much talk. ilohas became a talking point as soon as it launched, and in its first year it was the best-selling bottled water in Japan. The chatter and the money it made drew Japan's major news outlets, and Nikkei called the design "environmentalism you can physically feel."

There is no work Tokuda hates. The opposite, in fact: "With work I dislike, I work harder and pour in more passion, and I let the people around me feel that passion too. And then the work I dislike stops existing."

His client list holds companies as large as Coca-Cola and plenty of small firms nobody has heard of. The power of design shows most plainly when it helps a small company build a brand image, and it usually ends with everyone happy.

Flow Fushi, a cosmetics company founded four years ago, broke into Japan's drugstore cosmetics market with eyeliner and mascara built on a patented natural mineral it calls End Mineral. Every new product since has caused a stir, repeatedly topping Japan's @cosme beauty awards, and the company is treated as a heretic within the Japanese cosmetics industry.

Tokuda's work with Flow Fushi also began four years ago. He has done product and packaging design and made video ads for them, and has watched annual sales climb over those years from several hundred million yen to 10 billion.

Last summer Flow Fushi launched a lip treatment serum, LIP38°C, which introduced the idea that 38°C is the ideal temperature for lips. Each tube is said to contain 30 billion lactic acid bacteria that keep the lips mildly acidic and moist, and it became another Flow Fushi bestseller.

Tokuda designed a finely made case and package for it. After carefully working out the average lip width in Japan, he curved the applicator tip, so it spreads evenly no matter the flat width or the angle it is held at.

There have been moments when Tokuda felt stuck because he did not understand what was on a woman's mind. Years of work gave him an answer: "By going back to the client over and over — what kind of good design do you need, what do you think women need? — by reading piles of women's magazines and watching the women around me, I kept thinking, and in the end I made an original design that had never existed before."

Tokuda's office in Minami-Aoyama, Tokyo, has a thinking room and a making room. The thinking room is for open discussion, and to draw out more ideas and let everyone say something different, he filled it with green chairs, deliberately in different shades of green.

At work, Tokuda keeps a sharp line between what should be done and what he wants to do. The best result, he says, is hitting both at once. What should be done goes without saying; but if what he wants to do isn't done well, the philosophy of the product cannot reach the other side — the client, the consumer — in full.

This March, Tokuda's first solo exhibition, Another Eye, opened at CLEAR EDITION & GALLERY in Roppongi, Tokyo. It showed 72 of his own artworks and laid out the three key words of his career: more perspectives, positive thinking, and the power of design.

We talked with Tokuda about more:

Q: As a designer — the "monogatari," the story, between a product and its consumers — how do you connect the two sides?

"Monogatari" is the key word. It means story, and it needs explaining. It covers the product's characteristics, the maker's thinking and attitude toward the work, and, if the maker is a company, the founder's philosophy, the state of the competition, insight into consumers, and so on. The designer is the one telling the story, and has to keep changing as the times change.

Two words are popular in China right now: brand building, and brand. They mean different things.

Brand building means establishing a brand. It involves what stays the same, what must not change, and what has to change. Consumers tire of the old and chase the new faster and faster, so you have to tell them what does not change, and cultivate that awareness in an age of change. That is brand building.

Brand is what consumers expect of a product and how far they trust it. A brand is not a concrete thing. It is a value.

A designer has to arrive at a design that is one of a kind — not only in color and shape, but in philosophy.

Q: So how do you talk with clients?

Clients often say: we want a good design. But we have to go back and forth with them. What message about the product do you need to carry?

Take a design I am working on now, wigs for the massage salon Cotoyo. There are two kinds of customers: cancer patients, and people who simply want to look prettier. Two different needs would normally call for two different designs. But the client asked for a single package, so we kept asking why.

The client explained that customers buying for fashion want to wear a wig to all sorts of events, and cancer patients want to get back to the life they had. The client wanted the same packaging to take away the cancer patients' unease, so they could take part in social life freely.

Through that continuing conversation with the client, we ended up with this wig package. It lowers costs, unifies the brand image, and works against social prejudice.

Q: In the last few years, what innovations in packaging design are worth watching?

Consumption is a choice, and it is self-expression. The designer is the mirror of that self-expression. The power of innovation is meeting the consumer's wish for a better quality of life. We believe consumer awareness has to be cultivated, because consumers do not know what will happen in the future. Designers have to hypothesize, to create, and then give consumers the chance to discover the thing that was imagined.

Take the ilohas mineral water I mentioned. It hit 100 million in sales in a little over 90 days. That, in fact, is a kind of creation.

The imagination to picture something that never existed, plus the technique to make it — that is the source of innovation.

Q: From what you have seen, have consumer tastes changed in any new way in recent years?

Consumers like things that reflect their own life and personality. In the past they went for cheap and convenient; now, whether they are buying coffee or a suit, they choose by feeling, by what they like, and that trend keeps growing.

The other change is philosophy hardening into a form. Take MUJI. Thirty-odd years ago it was an unknown little brand, but it created its own style and philosophy, and now it has a huge following.

Or this: 20 years ago, a woman who was a Chanel fan was head-to-toe Chanel. Now she might wear a Chanel jacket over a Uniqlo shirt. Consumers are getting sharper and smarter, able to pick products that suit their own personality.

In Japan, before a product's characteristics take shape, a philosophy and a brand concept take shape first, and only then does anyone choose to develop a product. More and more select shops are opening in Japan now. This is the internet age: consumers can go online and find the story behind a brand, and learn how it was born.

Q: In your design process, what is the hardest part?

My design work covers every field; there is no design I can't do. What gives me a headache is how the client makes decisions. If there is a single owner, it is fairly simple. But when the decision comes from a team of many people, I find it very hard.

Take All Nippon Airways. It is a big company, but everyone there shares the same values and way of thinking, so the decision-making is fairly simple. Then there are companies that are nothing like that, where people think in completely different ways, and when a client cannot agree among themselves, the design gets much harder.

Cover image from: @ilohas/Twitter