Some packaging problems never make it onto a slide with your logo on it. They sit under an NDA, a competitor would enjoy reading them, or they are awkward to admit in public. Drop yours in the pain pool. Nobody sees who posted it unless you choose to say. We group what comes in, and the heaviest clusters become the hack tracks on Thursday 29 October.
A problem one brand will not name in public is usually one five others are quietly living with. The converter sees it across a dozen customers, the recycler sees it on the sorting belt. Pooled, it stops being your embarrassment and becomes the industry's brief.
Where you sit in the chain is the only thing we ask for. Name, company and email are optional, and you decide whether any of them ever appears next to the problem.
Before a problem leaves our inbox we take out brand names, SKUs, sites and any number that points back to you. If a detail matters, we generalise it: a 750 ml PET bottle for a home-care brand becomes a mid-size rigid bottle.
Pains from different corners of the chain that describe the same knot get grouped. The clusters with the most weight become the tracks, and each brief is written from the pool, in the pool's words.
Write it the way you would tell a colleague over coffee. Leave out anything under NDA. We only need enough to understand what hurts and why it is still unsolved.
Thank you. We read every problem ourselves and strip it before it goes anywhere. If you left an email, you will hear from us when the tracks are set. Got another one? Post it separately, one problem per form keeps the clustering clean.
Post another problemNow. Problems are read as they arrive and stripped of anything that points back to the sender.
October. We cluster the pool and set the tracks from the heaviest clusters. Teams get their briefs before the day.
29 October. Six mixed teams work the tracks at Capital C, and the answers are pitched at 16:00.
If you want your problem worked as a named challenge, with your data and your people in the room, that is the other route in.
We write every brief from a cluster of submissions, so no brief carries one company's fingerprint. Brand names, SKUs, sites, volumes and supplier names come out before anything is shared. If a problem is so specific that stripping it leaves nothing, we keep it out of the briefs and tell you, if you left an email.
Maybe on its own, more likely as part of a cluster. Six teams work three tracks on the day, so the pool will hold more problems than the afternoon can take. Everything in it feeds the November report, in generalised form, so no problem posted is wasted.
Yes, and please do. One problem per form keeps the clustering clean.
Very much. You see the same problem across many customers and cannot name any of them. The pool is built for exactly that.
