When a US Association Showcases Your Packaging as a Best Practice

See CMAA Article

It started with a submission I almost did not send

The CMAA Idea Fair is an annual showcase where North American professionals share what is working in their industries. The audience is serious. The bar is high.

When someone on my team suggested we submit Solpak's packaging approach, I hesitated.

Not because I doubted the work. Because I was not sure a Quebec-based packaging solution would resonate with a US audience that had their own established suppliers and preferences.

I was wrong to hesitate.

What we submitted

We put together a presentation of our approach to temperature-sensitive packaging for institutional clients. The methodology, the results, the real-world performance data.

No marketing language. No renderings of perfect packaging in clean environments. Actual performance in actual logistics chains.

That is what the CMAA audience responded to.

What best practice recognition actually means

Being selected as a best practice by a US professional association is not a sales tool. I want to be precise about that.

It is a signal that the approach you developed for your market has relevance beyond it. That the problem you solved is shared across borders, and that your solution is worth studying.

For Solpak, it confirmed something I had suspected for years: the standards we set for ourselves in Quebec were not local standards. They were industry standards.

What it changed

After the CMAA presentation, we had conversations with procurement managers from three US companies who had seen the showcase.

One of those conversations became a client relationship.

Good ideas travel. You just have to be willing to share them.