J&J Design Pro Calls for Sustainable Packaging

J&J’s Chris Hacker addresses the NJPEC crowd

At an NJPEC event, Chris Hacker entertains and inspires attendees with tales from his sustainable packaging design desk.

By Jamie Matusow, Editor

Chris Hacker, Johnson & Johnson’s chief design officer, consumer products, proposes a challenge to personal care packaging designers: Design a biodegradable bottle that will hold up to water-based formulations. “It would be great,” he said, “to have Johnson’s Baby Shampoo bottles disappear in a landfill.”

The design gauntlet was laid down at Hacker’s enthusiastic presentation at a New Jersey Packaging Executives Club (NJPEC) event, held March 11 at the Hyatt Morristown, in which the package design pro recounted his career in the industry and spoke about his current position working on an impressive portfolio that includes Neutrogena, Aveeno, Listerine and Band-Aid.

More than 120 members attended the evening of networking, which also included a buffet, cocktails and a 50/50 raffle for NJPEC’s scholarship program.

At one point, Hacker showed an image of a dump and recalled the first time he went to a landfill and saw a product he had designed—“It was not good,” he said, but added that it was an awakening.

“I realized that 15 minutes after bringing it [a consumer product] home, they [consumers] throw the package away. It was a sobering thought, he said: “I make garbage—it turns up in a landfill. That’s where all the products we design end up,” he said, the “we” referring to the packaging designers in the audience.

The reflective experience became the impetus behind Hacker’s driving interest in sustainable package design. Whether it’s reducing weight, substituting recycled materials or eliminating unnecessary carton parts, his designs aim for sustainability, an ideal, which he says, J&J wholeheartedly shares. Of course, like many companies on this eco-conscious path discover, these practices also trim the bottom line, saving not only millions of pounds of materials in some cases, but also, perhaps, millions of dollars.

Chris Hacker fields a question from Mane’s Molly Acorn.

An industrial designer by training, Hacker went from designing John Deere lawn mowers and AT&T headsets to Dansk china. Positions at Estée Lauder, Aramis and Warner Brothers followed, before he returned to Estée Lauder as senior vice president of global marketing and design for Aveda, where he was happily sustainably designing until J&J’s Colleen Goggins, worldwide chairman, consumer group, lured him away, basically, according to Hacker, by giving in to all his design demands. These included reporting to the chairman (instead of marketing); moving the design studio to Manhattan (from the very rural J&J Skillman, NJ headquarters) where he could have access to the best design talent; switching to Macintosh computers; making a strong connection between engineering and design teams; and ensuring that sustainability was a key focus of the packaging.

He joked that of all his requirements, J&J, “which buys more Microsoft software than any other company,” expressed the most reluctance over moving to Macs. In the end, however, Hacker got his way, and within just four years, he had requisitioned 40 units to equip the crackerjack design team he had assembled.

While Hacker concedes that not every package can meet sustainability criteria, he says, with scorecards becoming huge in development, designers must try to make a difference. ”Make the environment a part of your design work,” he offered. “Designers can make the difference by specifying recycled materials.”

He added: “Recycled and recyclable is the goal.”

Another thing to keep in mind, said the designer who holds more than 30 years of experience: “Suppliers need to become great partners.”

More info: www.njpec.com