The Pro Carton Pan European Carton Awards – what goes on Behind the Scenes?

While Storm has worked with Pro Carton in a communications capacity for five years, this is the first year that we have helped manage the European Carton Excellence Award, Pro Carton Young Designers Award and Pro Carton Student Video Award. It has been a hugely rewarding experience for our team, engaging with some incredible students and encouraging convertors and designers to submit more of their superb carton packages.

As with most rewarding experiences in life, we have learnt a lot along the way. And this will put us in a much stronger position to improve the experience the awards offer entrants in future years. Here are just some of the things we have been doing since we began working on the awards in January 2023:

• We had a series of very thorough handover meetings with the fantastic Suzanne Mc Ewen and Helena Schutte, who had run the awards for many years. During these meetings we discussed all aspects of the awards, from the entry form creation and newsletters, to the creation of certificates and logistics on the gala night itself. I would like to thank both Helena and Suzanne for helping us get up to speed so quickly.
• In February the entry form for the European Carton Excellence Award 2023 went live and our team began engaging with convertors, brand owners and designers to encourage entries. We were set an ambitious target of increasing the number of entries this year to over 100.
• From March to May a steady flow of entries came into our inboxes from students and the wider packaging community. It was great to see so many coming through, although we were still nervous about hitting all the targets. Thankfully during the deadline week, a huge number arrived to take us past our target numbers!
• Throughout this time, we began speaking to the team at Lejeune Association Management about the judging day and the logistics of getting physical packages to The Hague. Again, I’d like to thank Barbara Ginter and Angela Ashruf for their help in making the judging day run so smoothly.
• The judging day was a fantastic experience for our team. We met the supremely knowledgeable judging team for the European Carton Excellence Award and Pro Carton Young Designers Award. It’s hard to describe the challenges of running this session – the logistics of getting our judges to arrive on time and the issues of packages from entrants that get stopped in customs, learning about each package that has been entered and what its benefits are, ensuring the winners of each category are sent to the photographer – the list goes on. It was a challenging, but enjoyable few days in The Netherlands.
• Now that the winners were chosen and finalists selected, we launched the Public Award through the Pro Carton website, media and a series of newsletters. Again, we had an ambitious total of 10,000 votes as a target – a significant growth on last year. Thankfully, we saw the votes coming in thick and fast throughout the four-week period. During this time, our LinkedIn activity started to take off. Engagement was at record levels – thank you to everyone that liked, commented and, ultimately, voted.
• During this time, we began work on the awards brochure, certificates and trophies. What seems like a simple task, is hugely complex. We had to order materials from WestRock for frames and trophy sleeves and calculate the numbers for each that need to be produced and much more. A huge thank you to Susanne Lippitsch for all her advice and hard work in producing the frames and trophies – they will look amazing on the night. The brochure copy was written by our team over several days, checking carefully on all the details of the entrants. We worked closely with W&W Grafik und Design to create the design, which will also look fantastic.
• Our final jigsaw piece has been the presentation for the evening itself. This, I hope you will agree, will look great and will be a suitable backdrop for when all the successful entrants come on stage.