Creative head on a national tissue manufacturer, then in its distributor meetings

01

Situation

Kosher is a B2B tissue manufacturer — one of the largest in the country — which means its buyers are distributors and institutions, not shoppers. Their new product lines needed to launch to a trade audience, and the packaging had to do the selling on a warehouse shelf rather than a supermarket one.

02

The creative

I was creative head on new products and their launches, and I drew the packaging artwork myself. That is not the usual arrangement. Most studios at this size buy illustration in or hand it to a freelancer, which is why most B2B packaging in this category looks interchangeable. Kosher gave the artwork on a national product line to the person running their account, because I paint and they had seen the work.

A manufacturer with dozens of near-identical SKUs is distinguished by its artwork or by nothing at all. Being the studio that could actually make that artwork — the same reason the Nandini range landed — is why the account was ours to hold.

03

Where it stopped being a design job

It did not stop at the shelf. I ended up chairing their distribution team meetings — not as the agency presenting work, but running the session: which distributor was actually converting, which territory they were pitching into, where the pitch was landing and where it was not, and what the next push should be.

Between the two, that is the full account: the artwork on the box and the plan for who sells it. A client hands you the second one only after the first has earned it — by then I was not a supplier, I was the person deciding what the go-to-market did next.