At The Spearhead Group, supporting design and engineering schools is vital to our innovation and R&D programs. Our collaboration with Istituto Europeo di Design launched in May 2019 with an initial program that required the students to develop a spirits brands and any Physical Brand Enhancement™ to support them. This year, Spearhead sponsored our third luxury packaging design challenge named the PBE Awards™ with Istituto Europeo di Design based out of Turin, Italy. The students have been working with the “Less is More” theme for the 2022 PBE Award™ competition. The brief challenged them to create a Value-Added Gift Pack (VAP) engineered to use the least amount of CrownBoard Prestige™ paper which was generously donated by our strategic material Pioneer Billerud.
Spearhead has found that working with bright and upcoming students results in a tremendous amount of new and unique ideas. For years, the packaging space has become fairly static, and we pride ourselves as market disrupters by constantly pushing for change. The only way we can achieve change is by driving sustainability first and striving to make the market trends.” said Robert Catalano, Chief Innovation Officer & Co-founder.
We are proud to announce the winners of our annual PBE™ Awards. Congratulations to the first-place winners Morena DiMolfetta, Alessandra Pinto, and Massimo Piovano, with their project “Travel Bag”. The second-place winners were Paolo Bosetti, Francesco Falvio Noli, and Lorenzo Ravarino with their project “HUG”.
“We have been extremely impressed by the creativity and professional ability of the IED Torino students who took part in this very challenging project,” said Giovanna Pinna who leads the Spearhead PBE Awards™.
Special thanks to the students and to all those that helped make this a successful program, especially to Giovanna Pinna, European New Business Lead, Natale Bauducco, Advisor to The Spearhead Group, Paola Zini – IED Turin, Valeria Spada – Partnership and Special Projects – Italy, Marco Cassino – IED Professor – Italy, and Motoki Yoshio – IED Professor – Italy.
Thanks again to our esteemed panel of judges, Sebba Alqetrani, Director – Package Development Sustainability at MAC Cosmetics, Patricia Burguete, Head of Global Sustainability Strategies at The Spearhead Group, Inc., Humberto Ibarra (Beto), Co-Founder, CMO, and Owner at Tequila Mandala, Sarita Gonzalez, Project Leader – Luxury at Coty, Daniella Kohler, Brand Owner Manager – USA Cartonboard at Billerud, and Luis Carlos Vega, R&D Lead at The Spearhead Group, Inc.
Please follow us on our blog and LinkedIn to see more announcements about the 2022 PBE Awards™ program.