Told apart at two metres.

Nobody reads a shampoo bottle. They walk up to a fixture holding thirty or forty packs of almost identical proportion, and find theirs by colour and position in about two seconds. In this sector colour is navigation rather than decoration, which is why a variant that drifts half a shade towards the one beside it costs sales rather than just looking untidy.

That makes range architecture the real design job. A hair range might run to twelve variants across three formats, and each one has to be instantly separable from its neighbours while still obviously belonging to the same family. Getting that right on screen is straightforward. Holding it across a year of print runs, on different board batches, is the part that needs measuring.

Volume changes the economics too. Runs here are long and margins are thin, so board weight, sheet efficiency, how variants gang up on a forme and how the carton glues all show up in the cost per thousand. Those decisions belong at the drawing stage with the buyer in the room, not afterwards as a surprise.

And the pack lives somewhere wet. A bathroom is humid, hands are wet, and a carton that has sat beside a shower for a fortnight should not look tired. Substrate, lamination and adhesive get chosen for that, not for how they look on the day they leave here.