Good-looking packaging is everywhere. This British design firm is better at packaging that sells.

After 26 years in design, Pearlfisher's founder explains how he draws on today's most fashionable lifestyles to help clients remake themselves and find new business.

Just as luxury fashion brands were all switching their logos to clean, legible sans-serif type, Zara went the other way. The new logo it released in January 2019 is cramped, easy to misread, and looks almost like a Harper's Bazaar headline.

Plenty of people attacked the design, but Jonathan Ford wrote an article explaining why he thought it was a bold rebrand. His argument came down to one word — different. Once again, Zara had refused to accept the visual style the luxury brands had set.

Ford is CEO and creative partner of Pearlfisher, the well-known British design firm, and his admiration for Zara's new logo rests on years of work in retail packaging: on a shelf full of products, the one that looks least like the others is the design that works.

The rule doesn't always hold in fashion. But in food and drink, where people buy on impulse, our verdict on a product starts the moment we see the packaging on a bottle of juice or a bar of chocolate.

Good design is good business, and Pearlfisher is one of the best examples of that idea in practice. Founded 26 years ago, with offices in London, New York, Copenhagen, and San Francisco, the strategic creative and design agency has spent years designing bottle labels, logos, and packaging for Coca-Cola, Cadbury, General Mills, Nongfu Spring, and others, and has won Britain's DBA Design Effectiveness Awards for 20 years running.

The DBA awards go mainly to designs that have brought lasting commercial success, which means a winning entry has survived at least two years in the market. The organization's website keeps a scoreboard ranking the design firms with the most wins over the past three years, awarding 15 points down to 5 for gold through bronze. Pearlfisher sits second on that scoreboard, with exactly 100 points.

Apart from the international food and drink giants, most of Pearlfisher's clients are British brands. The only Chinese company it has worked with over the long term is Nongfu Spring — the packaging for both Oriental Leaf tea and Shuirong C100 came from Pearlfisher.

Nongfu Spring's partnership with Pearlfisher began in 2010, the year the self-styled porter of nature had just come through its water-source scandal and was aiming upmarket: the photograph of Changbai Mountain on its bottle label gave way for the first time to an abstract landscape drawing, and the Oriental Leaf tea that followed was easily the most striking new product on shelves packed with sugary teas that year.

In April we met Jonathan Ford at the FBIF 2019 Food & Beverage Innovation Forum in Hangzhou, where he gave a talk called Designing for Our Future Lifestyles. One key point: making a product desirable is no longer enough. A large design agency today has to take its ideas from the most fashionable ways of living, and use them to help clients change course and find new business.

Sounds easy, doesn't it? In practice, anyone can have an opinion about a trend. Making a design that gives a whole shelf a fresh face is far harder than it sounds.

Take packaging design under the health trend. A lot of packaged food sold on health uses plain, sometimes painfully restrained packaging — but shoppers read that style as settling for less in exchange for being healthy.

The result is brown and raw-wood tones everywhere, which shuts out, on sight, the customers who want to be healthy and still enjoy what they eat.

In 2011 Pearlfisher took on a project to build a whole brand and packaging system for a balanced-nutrition private label at Waitrose, Britain's sixth-largest supermarket chain. The finished range used lively, bright colors, with fresh ingredients stacked up like building blocks.

A month after launch, one in every five shoppers walking into Waitrose bought something from the LOVE Life range, and over the next seven months Waitrose quickly added more than 80 products to it.

"Private label is the best place for fresh ideas to be born," Jonathan Ford said. "Waitrose controls its own brand and can change the packaging on its own, and having countless categories helps you carry an idea all the way through."

Waitrose is the work Pearlfisher is proudest of. Its break with the conventions of healthy-food design was copied by one retailer after another, and many healthy-snack brands started using bolder colors too.

"I have to say, sadly, that any design today has to be highly Instagrammable." Jonathan Ford has made his peace with this in recent years, because he noticed that "starting four years ago, almost every brief we got was about designing for millennials."

"I'd meet a beer brand that wanted to do something to attract millennials, then a cosmetics brand that also wanted to attract millennials. But they never tell you what millennial actually means to them."

That is why Pearlfisher started an in-house research project called Futures Modes in 2014. Each year this small team looks at where four creative fields are heading — taste, body, luxury, and connection — and passes what it learns to the strategy department, where it feeds specific design projects. A figure like "80 percent of Americans eat lunch at their desks" might point to an opening for snacks and protein bars sold by subscription.

Futures Modes exists to make sure the firm does more than turn out good-looking work — that it keeps company with the businesses capable of inventing new business.

In his Hangzhou talk, Jonathan Ford dwelt on a project from four years earlier, Seedlip, unusual because Pearlfisher later became a shareholder in the brand.

Seedlip calls itself the world's first non-alcoholic distilled spirit. Ben Branson, a 33-year-old Briton, founded it in 2015, and it has released three flavors so far, each distilled from a mix of plants and spices, with the taste of a spirit and none of the alcohol.

It isn't cheap either — a 700-milliliter bottle retails for about £29.99. In its early days the brand had almost no budget for marketing or distribution, but on the strength of an exotic label design the first 1,000 bottles at the upmarket department store Selfridges sold out in three weeks, and the brand soon reached more than 50 Michelin-starred restaurants and luxury hotels. In July 2016, Distill Ventures, the venture fund owned by Diageo, bought a minority stake in Seedlip — the first time the spirits group had invested in a non-alcoholic drinks company.

Government figures show that consumption of alcoholic drinks in Britain fell 26 percent between 2002 and 2012. Helen Michels, Diageo's global innovation director, said in the investment announcement, "We recognize the market opportunity in non-alcoholic drinks."

In the brand story told afterwards, Branson always appears as a young farmer who likes tinkering with distilling equipment. In fact he had been a marketing director in the drinks industry, which is how Pearlfisher came across him in the first place. For Pearlfisher, Seedlip was not just a packaging job; it also carried their sharp reading of a new business model.

"By type of work, our business is roughly 35 percent packaging design, 35 percent brand design, 25 percent brand strategy, and 5 percent future insight." According to Jonathan Ford, jobs where Pearlfisher designs a brand from start to finish and takes equity in it are rare, only 1 percent of the business; the firm's income still comes mostly from the food giants. "Brand design should be the fastest-growing part. People no longer treat packaging as a job on its own, and clients are starting to understand the value of what we do."

The change in what Pearlfisher sells follows directly from the acquisitions and consolidation across the food industry over the past two years. Whether a large company launches a new product line or buys a young brand, more and more brands end up with the same owner — and their packaging strategies need bringing up to date.

The Meatsnacks Group is now the largest maker of meat snacks in Europe by market share. It grew out of two long-established European jerky companies, Jerky and Biltong, which merged in 2015 and brought nine jerky brands under one roof in a single stroke. The merger gave the group scale, but left its brand portfolio looking scattered and in need of a rethink. Under Pearlfisher's hand, jerky with an American Western flavor, jerky for health-conscious snackers, and traditional British jerky each got a new face.

Now look at yogurt. Euromonitor data shows that yogurt sales in the United States have fallen for two years running. General Mills, which owns the Yoplait brand, first faced competition from Greek yogurts such as Chobani, which won shoppers over with natural ingredients and more protein. But as more and more snacks and drinks joined the high-protein crowd, even Greek yogurt stopped selling well before long — category sales dropped 4.9 percent in 2017 — while Australian- and Icelandic-style yogurts began to climb.

General Mills launched the traditional French-style yogurt oui in 2017 and the high-protein, low-sugar YQ by Yoplait in 2018. The first comes in a glass jar to bring out a handmade feel; the second drops the visual furniture common to Greek yogurt — a white plastic tub with pictures of fruit — for a cool, rational gray, stating the protein and sugar content in words alone.

"I don't think there is any such thing as a packaging design trend. Show me three packaging designs in style A and I'll find you three in the opposite style B straight away." Jonathan Ford believes packaging design in the mobile era has no single style. "Every millennial thinks differently. We have to find the style that is exactly right for the brand."

But more and more healthy-food packaging is moving its emphasis from organic to texture. Look at the 2017 redesign at Chobani, the largest Greek yogurt brand in the United States.

"In 26 years we've had plenty of competitors. A designer today can sit in a coffee shop with one laptop and do the work. So where is our advantage? We compete with independent designers working alone, and large agencies and consulting firms are now buying up companies with design skills as well. We keep widening and raising our own capabilities."

You can see that advertising man's way of thinking in the packaging Pearlfisher made for Tribe, a sports energy bar brand. The bars usually turn up by the boxful at marathons and similar events, with lines like Tri-be Bold and Tri-be Fearless printed on the boxes in a neat play on the name.

If he has to name one trend, Ford thinks the next big change in retail packaging design is not a pattern or a color but design that can be recycled — a demand pushed by shoppers and companies alike.

The problem recyclable design most urgently has to solve is plastic. According to the Recycled Packaging Market Report from Smithers Pira, the recycled share of cardboard, metal, and glass will stay roughly flat over the next five years; these are mature, saturated recycling industries. Plastic is expected to be the fastest-growing recycled material, with a recycling rate reaching 19 to 24 percent by 2023, driven by brand owners, lawmakers, and consumers changing their minds at the same time.

In the news over the past year we have already seen big restaurant companies such as McDonald's and Starbucks looking for substitutes for plastic, and Danone and Coca-Cola announcing, one after the other, when they will switch to 100 percent recycled plastic (the earliest date is 2025). In an industry that produces countless new brands every day, whether a new design can be recycled has become a bigger question.

"Of course, it is hard to ask a packaging designer to solve every problem, especially for clients who buy thousands of tons of packaging material a year," Ford said. "In plastic we still don't have a sound system for recycling. So the most interesting part of design today, for me, is finding a design that closes its own loop."

Take the takeaway box Pearlfisher designed in 2015 for Wagamama, the Japanese ramen chain. Judged on function, the original looked close to perfect — a stackable black round bowl inside a cardboard sleeve, with a slot for wooden chopsticks and the takeaway menu printed on the cardboard, tidier than tucking in a separate leaflet.

"Then one day we found out that although the plastic in this takeaway bowl was recyclable, the color black is hard for the optical scanners at British recycling plants to detect. In the end a lot of them went to landfill rather than being recycled."

Pearlfisher spotted that detail in the recycling process and advised the client to throw out an idea it had bought years earlier. On Earth Day, April 22 this year, Wagamama announced it would change all its black takeaway bowls to gray, and said this could bring 15.4 million plastic bowls back into recycling.

The cardboard sleeve, which used up 2.7 million units a year, was dropped in the same update, replaced by a small round paper disc that clips into the center of the lid.

"Ideally we'd want Wagamama to move to a completely new material, but plastic really is cheap." Jonathan Ford would not say what the change cost. "You could also call it a failed design — but we put it right."

Cover image: New retail packaging for Intelligentsia coffee / Pearlfisher