Today, the world is demanding more of products and packaging: They need to travel through different channels, be sustainable, meet ever evolving regulatory requirements, and keep up with changing consumer tastes. But most organizations aren’t equipped to keep up.

For over 20 years, Matthew Wright witnessed these trends firsthand as he traveled across the country and sold packaging to businesses both large and small, watching everything you can imagine be made.

From retail and food, to heavy industrials, CPG and beauty, industries that made physical products began to struggle with issues stemming from a lack of packaging and product data. Not only was it frustrating, it was bad for business. Companies were wasting time, unable to unlock cost savings, slow to innovate, and typically confused when it came to the state of their own products.

In The Evolution of Products and Packaging, Wright provides a first-hand account of the trends that ushered in an explosion of SKUs and an increase in supply chain complexity that plagues manufacturers, brands, and retailers still today. Over the course of Wright’s own evolution from packaging executive to business owner and software start-up founder, the answer to this complexity seemed simple: To keep up, the professionals would need to embrace data to make better, smarter, more sustainable products and packaging.

You’ll recognize stories of packaging and product failures, the common pitfalls organizations slip into when it comes to managing their most important data, and a glimpse into the future of how data can drive the answers to some of our most pressing supply chain challenges.