Pack Futures: The Future of Design, Brand Relevance, and AI with Jared Richardson

Welcome to Pack Futures by 3D Color. Hosted by Jason Hauer and fellow 3D Color leaders, this series explores how leaders in CPG and retail harness innovation, technology and emerging consumer insights to shape the future of packaging.

In this conversation, we speak with Jared Richardson, former SVP and Head of Global Design at Colgate-Palmolive. Over seven and a half years, Jared transformed design from a packaging function into a strategic growth driver, growing the team, adding capabilities and championing innovation like the recyclable toothpaste tube. We discuss measuring design’s strategic value, material innovation at scale, and the provocative question that keeps him up at night: what happens to brand relevance when AI agents start making purchasing decisions on our behalf?

Elevating Design from Craft to Strategic Growth Driver

When you joined Colgate, design was buried in the organization, reporting to packaging engineers. How did you transform it into a strategic function?

The journey was about demonstrating value in multiple dimensions. When I started, design was a packaging team consisting mostly of design managers. My charge was transforming it into a multi-capability, hands-on design team that could drive strategic growth and have major project success across categories, geographies, and brands.

In 2022, our CEO asked me to benchmark how good we were compared to peer companies in the CPG space. We created a framework with six criteria to measure design engagement:

Senior-level advocacy: Is design supported with budget, headcount, and communication from the CEO down?

Strategic integration: Is design upstream in strategic conversations, including potentially corporate growth strategy?

People-centricity: Has the organization shifted its mindset to embed people at the center of each brand experience. Understand needs, listen with empathy to consumers, customers and each other.

Problem-solving catalyst: Does Design drive the approach around identifying and framing of opportunities. Supports a culture of curiosity and experimentation.

Growth driver: Can design demonstrate material contribution to top-line growth?

Quantifiable value: Can you measure design’s impact?

Over several years we were able to elevate the Design org to report into the CTO and then up again to the COO, with peers including the heads of IT, R&D, Digital, Marketing, and Supply Chain. That proximity to decision-making was critical.

You mentioned creating your own study to quantify design value. What did you discover?

We followed in the footsteps of Design Management Institute (DMI) and McKinsey Value of Design report, but we did our own study. We looked at three things:

First, share price performance. If you took $10,000 and invested it 10 years ago, did design-engaged companies perform better than their peer group? In every single case, more design-engaged companies performed significantly better. Colgate was right in the middle.

Second, brand health. Could we create a correlation between measuring a brand’s health, such as relevance, distinctiveness and likeability, and the design activities during the period of measurement, such as a relaunch.

Third, project impact. This is where it gets concrete. Take Hill’s Science Diet as an example. No formula change, no channel change, no pricing change, just a great packaging design change. We created $100 million in new revenue in the first year. That’s a crystal-clear demonstration of design value.

That success gave us permission to do bigger things: transforming Irish Spring from a brand with a dying audience into something relevant again, consolidating the complexity of the Colgate brand system across many thousands of pieces of artwork, and eventually taking on platform innovations like the recyclable tube or connected health electric brush and brushing app.

Material Innovation and the Recyclable Tube

The recyclable tube is a fascinating case study. Can you walk through that decision?

Around 2018, we did some deep brand work and realized brand Colgate is a a hero brand. That discovery led us to be more courageous and take leadership positions on big issues. The recyclable tube was the right thing to do. Removing a layer of metal from the tube took five years of hardcore engineering.

We launched unproven technology at enormous scale. At the time, we were producing over 17,000 tubes of toothpaste a minute across all of our manufacturing sites. You can imagine the risk of putting new, unproven technology through those production lines. But it was the right thing to do: less material, more recyclable, better for shareholders and consumers.

And here’s what I think demonstrates true leadership: we open-sourced it. Any competitor who needed to put something in a squeezable tube could use the recyclable tube technology. That’s leadership at scale. Ultimately, the execution was excellent and the project very successful.

What other material experiments are worth watching?

I’m a big believer that a good design mindset is curious and always experimenting. And it’s not just designers who need to experiment. It means a curious company is always experimenting. Over history, that’s shown to be one of the four pillars of longevity. Companies that survive long-term have the resilience to withstand downturns, global pandemics, economic pressure, and wars. One of those pillars is continuous experimentation.

Material experimentation is critical. Whether it’s using more recycled material in your biggest brands (as long as it doesn’t hurt the brand) or exploring completely different materials. Can consumers use a bamboo toothbrush? Can you use recycled material in liquid products? Can you design a durable toothbrush handle with replaceable heads, so you’re only changing 25% of the product each time instead of throwing away the entire thing?

We’ve made mouthwaste from aluminum bottle, like a premium Coke bottle. They were beautiful, metallic, different. Did consumers see that as premium in this category? These are the kinds of experiments you need to run.

You want to be driving innovation, but you also want to be eyes-open to other people’s innovation. You don’t know where the next breakthrough will come from.

The Future of Brand in an AI-Driven World

You have some provocative theories about brand relevance in the future. Walk me through your thinking.

The idea of ‘brand’ is a really, really old idea, thousands of years old. Humans have been branding things since forever ago. In recent history, it has become a science and an art form. But here’s the question that keeps me up at night: What happens when machines start making purchasing decisions instead of us? Instead of humans.

For the first time in history, the thing choosing the package (whether physically or digitally) might not be a human. All of the craft, love, emotion, and care that we’ve put into how a brand shows up… what if that’s no longer a criteria for choice?

What happens when our synthetics operate on our behalf? How do we know they’re making the right choices for us? And honestly, isn’t this already happening with (Amazon) algorithms? Haven’t we been living in this for a while?

Brand relevancy might not matter in the way we think it does today. An AI agent might optimize purely for price, or ease, or lowest load to the supply chain. What does flavor or expert recommendations mean to an algorithm?

So much work and thinking has been put into helping people make decisions based on what we think people want. I think it’s possible all of that could get disrupted pretty soon.

So trust and data become the new moat?

It raises interesting questions about trust. When I wake up and my sleep tracker says I got a 92, but I don’t feel great… do I feel better because the data told me I should? If an AI is making choices for me, am I feeling certain ways because it told me to?

These are the kinds of questions we need to be asking.

Experimentation in a Turbulent Marketplace

CPG brands are facing intense pressure from private label, margin compression, and changing consumer behavior. What does meaningful experimentation look like in that environment?

First, let me be clear: when I talk about sustainability, it’s not for sustainability’s sake. Most of the time, it’s better business. It’s better for the company, better for shareholders. People are always going to need oral care products. Getting to as little waste as possible while maintaining efficacy is just smart business, not greenwashing.

Beyond that, I’m a believer in brand purpose and brand DNA at the center of great packaging. But in CPG, packaging is obviously an important touchpoint but it’s not the whole story. You’ve got all these other places where you can drive experience and emotion.

The real transformation of understanding design’s role at Colgate was this: Yes, packaging is important, but build a holistic brand experience, and your packaging will ride on the tide of that. Your packaging is this amazing thing that sits in people’s lives without a battery, without a screen, never goes off. It’s always there. It’s always on.

If you can create a trigger emotion every time someone interacts with it, you’ve got more than just packaging. You’ve got real-life brand equity.

How should brands think about experimentation when they’re getting squeezed by private label?

The risk of not experimenting is greater than the risk of experimenting. You need to be testing materials, formats, experiences, messages. But here’s the critical part: organic, analog process gives you the time and depth to understand the problem itself.

If you’re only going fast and easy with AI-generated insights, you might end up with false positives and false confidence. You might not even be asking the right questions, let alone getting the right answers. It’s easy for that to become the norm when everyone’s excited about efficiency, but you just end up with noisy, crappy stuff.

AI’s Impact on Design Work

Speaking of AI, what impact do you see it having on design capability and execution?

I think we need to talk about automation alongside AI. They’re connected but not the same. Essentially, it’s about how you do stuff and what technology helps you do it.

I’ll be honest: the more I use AI tools, the less nourishing and fulfilling they feel. I started playing with Suno with my kids. It’s magical, unbelievable technology. But it’s not going to replace amazing music or songwriting or art. The more I write with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, the more empty it feels.

Here’s the thing: AI is designed to give you the average. It’s literally averaging everything that came before. I don’t want to live an average life or be an average creative person. I want to create exceptional work, new work, thought-provoking work that moves people to do stuff. I don’t know that AI is designed to do that.

Final Thoughts

Richardson’s perspective challenges the industry to think beyond incremental improvements and consider fundamental shifts in how brands create value. As AI agents increasingly mediate between brands and consumers, and as material innovation becomes table stakes rather than differentiator, the companies that thrive will be those that build genuine behavioral ecosystems, demonstrate measurable value creation, and maintain the courage to experiment at scale.

The recyclable tube wasn’t just a sustainability play. It was a statement about leadership, openness, and long-term thinking. Those principles might matter more than ever in a future where algorithms choose our toothpaste.

Ready to bring the future of packaging to life? Or have a perspective on the future of packaging you’d like to share? Reach out to Bob Jennings, CEO of 3D Color, at bob.jennings@3dcolor.com. Our rapid prototyping and color‑perfect samples can help you test new ideas, and we’re always eager to feature fresh voices in Pack Futures.