Five SKUs of Golightly sugar-free candies will undergo a complete makeover courtesy of the design teams.

Package Design's Second Annual Makeover Challenge has begun in earnest. This year's five inventive and proficient design teams are Brand Engine, Goodwin, Gravity, Tin Horse, and a team of students from Michigan State University's School of Packaging.

The assignment this year is to rethink and redesign the packaging of five SKUs of the Golightly brand of sugar-free hard candy. Made by Hillside Candy company in New Jersey, the SKUs include two bags, a box (shown here), a small tin, and a holiday acetate box. The results of the teams' efforts will be revealed in the pages of our July/August issue in late July, when online voting by readers and web-surfers also begins.

Online voting for the Challenge will end on the last day of Pack Expo Las Vegas, where Pack Expo attendees can also vote on their favorite designs. Designers at Brandimation, a package design, product development, and web-based solution company in Morrisville, PA, will prepare interactive 3D images for the online voting experience. The team with the most votes will be the cover story subject of Package Design's November/ December issue, and a $5,000 student scholarship contribution in the winning team's name will be delivered to MSU's School of Packaging.

The major sponsor of the Challenge is Paxonix, a MeadWestvaco division that provides software asset management solutions to the packaging field. The design teams were able to use the latest version of their PaxPro software during the Challenge free of charge. The newest version, PaxPro 3.0, allows designers to create mission-critical, packaging-driven strategies to improve time to market.

Makeover Challenge teams have trial access to PaxPro 3.0 online project tracking and asset management software, provided by sponsor Paxonix.

PaxPro provides tools for digital asset management, workflow and collaboration, project management, visualization and soft proofing, as well as specification management — all built on a common foundation of best practices. The software provides return on investment by stripping time and cost out of the brand marketing and package development processes.

Bilinski's makeover revisited

In 1929, Joseph Bilinski, a Ukrainian immigrant who'd settled in Cohoes, N.Y., started making sausage, kielbasa, and other Old World meat products in his garage. He later opened a home-based retail outlet and in the 1940s built a local manufacturing plant. Today, that plant is operated by the Schonwetter family, the present owners of the Bilinski Sausage Manufacturing Co.

The new Bilinski's logos are courtesy of the 2004 Package Design Makeover Challenge and Webb Scarlett deVlam.

Eight years had passed since the last major design changes at Bilinski's, so the 2004 Makeover Challenge was a welcome opportunity for this company looking to reposition itself in a healthier vein. The Schonwetter family was very impressed by all of the exceptional Makeover Challenge entries presented to them. However, the Schonwetter family liked the Webb Scarlett deVlam entry more than the readers' choice, Anthem.

"I was stunned about how much work and effort was put in," says Steve Schonwetter, principal of Bilinski's. He recalls his staff's jaws literally dropping when they first laid eyes on the Makeover submissions. With slight modifications, Bilinski's is now transferring all of its products over to the two new logos and package design elements from Webb Scarlett deVlam.

Schonwetter said his company is taking this moment as a branding opportunity to help the Bilinski product line shift gears and position its premium products in a narrower niche. The Bilinski product lines are in the process of becoming either all natural or certified organic. Schonwetter believes his premium product's are well-suited to grow with this fast-growing category, especially with the new identity.

Schonwetter says the newly branded packages are a hit with all who come into contact with them, from suppliers to supermarket customers. "It has brought a new level of excitement, and that enthusiasm rubs off on our customers," Schonwetter says.