OCAD University designers take home top packaging prize
Monday, June 29, 2015 - 4:00am

Zhi Gao and Dora Poon

Great Value Eco Cleaner
Dora Poon (BDes, Industrial Design, 2015) and Zhi Gao (fourth-year Graphic Design student) emerged victorious at the 2015 student design competition organized by the Packaging Consortium (PAC), beating out rivals from Durham, Seneca, Humber, Mohawk and George Brown colleges. This is the second year in a row that an OCAD University team has scored first place.
Professor Stuart Werle offered the contest as a project option for his Packaging Design 2 students in winter 2015. The competition rules stipulated that each team design packaging for a 710 mL bottle of Walmart’s Great Value Eco toilet bowl cleaner. Werle encouraged participating students to demonstrate how their branding and packaging for that product could translate to other items in the Great Value Eco line.
With only one entry permitted for each institution, Werle formed a committee — including Mhairi Robertson, who won the 2014 competition — to select OCAD U’s entry. Members chose Poon’s effort as the top design; however, seeing great strength in Gao’s design, Werle encouraged the two to collaborate.
On June 17, Poon and Gao pitched their work in a seven-minute presentation to more than 200 packaging-industry leaders at the PACEX Toronto packaging show. After all the teams had spoken, the audience voted in real time, with Poon and Gao coming out on top. For Werle, “the key to their design was the blending of very strong branding, packaging graphics and bottle form with truly unique and innovative sustainable elements, including a 5X concentrate EcoPak® that would enable consumers to reuse each bottle without having to recycle them.”


Dora Poon (BDes, Industrial Design, 2015) and Zhi Gao (fourth-year Graphic Design student) emerged victorious at the 2015 student design competition organized by the Packaging Consortium (PAC), beating out rivals from Durham, Seneca, Humber, Mohawk and George Brown colleges. This is the second year in a row that an OCAD University team has scored first place.
Professor Stuart Werle offered the contest as a project option for his Packaging Design 2 students in winter 2015. The competition rules stipulated that each team design packaging for a 710 mL bottle of Walmart’s Great Value Eco toilet bowl cleaner. Werle encouraged participating students to demonstrate how their branding and packaging for that product could translate to other items in the Great Value Eco line.
With only one entry permitted for each institution, Werle formed a committee — including Mhairi Robertson, who won the 2014 competition — to select OCAD U’s entry. Members chose Poon’s effort as the top design; however, seeing great strength in Gao’s design, Werle encouraged the two to collaborate.
On June 17, Poon and Gao pitched their work in a seven-minute presentation to more than 200 packaging-industry leaders at the PACEX Toronto packaging show. After all the teams had spoken, the audience voted in real time, with Poon and Gao coming out on top. For Werle, “the key to their design was the blending of very strong branding, packaging graphics and bottle form with truly unique and innovative sustainable elements, including a 5X concentrate EcoPak® that would enable consumers to reuse each bottle without having to recycle them.”