Sustainable packaging hero, 2880×1620
Work › Sustainable packaging
Three companies had a better product. All three were losing to plastic.
Clients
Schropp (Germany) · Haso (Japan / EU) · CapLid (Switzerland)
Sector
Sustainable packaging, plastic replacement
Role
Positioning, messaging, brand identity, and communication systems
Overview
PositioningMessagingBrand StrategyIdentity SystemsSub-brand ArchitectureWebsiteBrochure
Three separate companies, in three countries, selling genuinely better packaging into markets that had heard the same environmental promise from everyone else. The same call was made all three times, and it had almost nothing to do with the environment.
product and material samples across the three clients, 1800×1200
01
The products were real. The category had already been ruined.
Schropp made genuinely biodegradable single-use packaging, including see-through paper for bakery goods that let a customer see the product without the package being plastic. Haso made paper-based products aimed at replacing single-use plastics outright, selling to global distributors. CapLid replaced the plastic lid on wet wipes, targeting roughly fourteen million kilos of annual polypropylene waste.
All three had something substantiated. All three were selling into a category where every competitor already claimed the same thing and most of them could not back it up. A buyer hearing “better for the environment” for the hundredth time discounts it on sight, and the companies with real engineering behind the claim get discounted alongside the ones without.
02
Stop selling the environment. Sell the regulation, the engineering, and the cost.
The decision, made the same way in all three engagements, was to refuse the category’s own vocabulary. No language, imagery, or tone shared with the greenwashing companies, because using it puts a real product in the same bucket as the empty ones. The register became engineering instead, and every claim had to be substantiated and verifiable.
Then the reason to buy was moved off ethics entirely. The argument became the political and regulatory landscape: single-use plastic is being legislated out, and moving off it is not a values decision for a company that packages products, it is an adaptation they have to make to keep operating. That reframes the buyer’s question from whether they care to when they move.
The third piece was money, addressed rather than avoided. Changing over means machinery, supply chains, and manufacturing all have to change, and that is expensive. Each of the three companies had assessment and consulting capability set up to help customers through exactly that changeover, so the offer was never just a product. It was a route through an expensive, mandatory shift, and saying so plainly was more persuasive than any environmental appeal.
messaging and identity system applied across the three brands, 1800×1200
the three identity systems side by side, 1800×1200
03
Three brands that argue like engineers, not campaigners.
Each company got the system its own market needed. Schropp got a message that held across several distinct product categories, with the categories built as sub-brands separated only by color and imagery inside one shared identity, plus the brochure and website that carried it. Haso got creative direction, identity, website and marketing assets built to establish a global presence with distributors. CapLid got a brand identity and website built to make an environmental product argument to a consumer market without sounding like one.
All three engagements ended at delivery, so there is no downstream metric to report here, the same honest gap as the fintech study’s outcome chapter. What is real is what the work was built to do: let each company walk into a room and be read as the substantiated, professional operation it already was, instead of as another green claim.
“We had the product. We didn’t have the words for it. Zoltán gave us a value proposition we could launch with, and it’s still what we lead with.”
— Sven Schropp, CEO, Schropp GmbH & Co.
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You already know something isn't landing.
You’ve probably known for a while. What you don’t know is whether it’s the message, the brand, or the website, and guessing at it costs more than asking.