The world we navigate today is shaped by forces - cultural, technological, emotional - moving faster than we can always make sense of. In this accelerating landscape, creativity can feel constrained, pressed into the familiar, which offers safety but slowly erodes a brand’s ability to stand apart. Progress, however, has never thrived in the familiar; it belongs to those willing to look beyond the edge of the known.
Imagination Science invites that gaze. It illuminates the patterns hidden between human behaviour and cultural meaning, between data and desire. It takes us beyond what people say to what they feel, uncovering the subtle codes and contradictions that shape decisions long before algorithms detect them. Through this lens, insight becomes expansive rather than reductive - fuel for originality, not justification for the expected.
With this understanding, brands step into possibility. They move from reacting to shaping the worlds they wish to inhabit. Worlds where strategy responds to cultural nuance, innovation is grounded in truth rather than trend, and ideas dare to be different. Imagination Science is not just a way to interpret the present, but a way to envision futures powerful enough to resonate, endure, and cut through.
This reimagining of possibility lies at the heart of 8th-day, the London-based brand strategy and innovation consultancy founded by Chloe Williams, one of the voices on the “Hidden Women, Visible Impact” panel at Packaging Innovations & Empack 2026. For decades, packaging and product development have often revolved unconsciously around a “default male” consumer. Now, as more women enter design, product development, and leadership roles, previously overlooked perspectives are reshaping the landscape.
As Chloe Williams explains, “When women are at the table, we start asking questions that might never have been considered. It’s about noticing the little things that affect how a product feels, works, and connects with its user.” These voices spot subtle pain points and embed inclusivity in ways that fundamentally shift how products are conceived and experienced. “Design isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s about empathy,” Chloe continues. “When we put ourselves in the shoes of everyone who might touch or use a product, the outcomes are richer, more thoughtful, and more human.”
Reading the signals
The future does not arrive fully formed; it seeps in through changing routines, shifting demographics, unexpected behaviours, and tiny signals that most people overlook. For Chloe, anticipating what consumers will want over the next decade is part foresight, part anthropology, and part cultural translation.
“I’m a product designer and engineer, and my speciality is product innovation,” she said. “I often work with clients to plan what they’ll launch to market over the next three to ten years. Most of my work is about understanding how our lives are changing, what clients need to be aware of, and how we start building product pipelines today for the future.”
Even ten years, Chloe admits, “feels like a stretch,” but companies must attempt it because the world consumers inhabit is being reconfigured faster than the systems built to serve them. Tooling new packaging lines takes years. Launching products often involves navigating complex legal and safety approval processes, which can significantly slow down timelines. And through all this, behaviour is shifting dramatically - often long before brands realise.
New consumers, new realities
One of the clearest examples, Chloe says, comes from a category as familiar as ketchup.
“A couple of years ago, I worked for Heinz Ketchup,” she continued. “We all grew up with Heinz ketchup in our homes and it was the thing on the family dinner table, but our taste palates have changed. So now not everyone has ketchup on their table when they grow up.”
Identity, once shaped by music or clothing, now extends to every micro-decision: the beauty products you reach for, the foods you choose, the brands you allow into your cupboards. Teenagers are not merely consuming; they are curating. The choices made at 13 or 14 are the ones many will carry into adulthood - and they’re making those choices earlier, with far greater brand fluency.
“They're a lot more consumer and brand savvy than generations before them… what they do now is the thing they'll carry with them into the future. So, every brand is thinking about recruitment strategies in a way that they've never thought about it before.”
Where previous generations discovered brands at life’s traditional markers - the first home, the wedding, the new baby - these milestones now come later, or not at all. And that changes everything.
The single-household revolution
Chloe references The Economist, a statistic she has been “quite prominent talking about” in discussing: “Among Americans aged 25–34: 50% of men and 41% of women live without a spouse or partner. And this figure is projected to keep growing.”
This demographic swing is seismic. Packaging designed for families of four no longer fits a world in which adults increasingly live alone, dine alone, spend alone, and make independent purchasing decisions.
“If we have more people living alone, what's that going to mean for our homes, what's that going to mean for the things we buy. This shift fundamentally rewrites the assumptions behind packaging, the size of it, the price of it, format, storage… We've built a world based on 2.4 children… and that's not happening anymore.”
The implications ripple outward: smaller formats, different price sensitivities, new emotional and functional needs, and more women and men making entirely self-determined choices.
Borrowing behaviours: How trends jump categories
To build future pipelines, Chloe often looks beyond a client’s category entirely, studying analogous sectors for behavioural cues.
“A good example… in the cleaning category, we look at what's going on in beauty.”
Ingredients like probiotics - long associated with gut health - have leapt from supplements to skincare to, unexpectedly, home cleaning. For Mrs. Myers, Chloe helped define the format for these cleaning “micro helpers.”
“When it comes to using probiotics in cleaning, you need to leave them on the surface, you don't wash them off… so we had to find a way to get consumers to think about that new behaviour.”
Behaviour change rarely happens through instruction alone; it happens through design and language. The same thinking extends to alcohol, where flavour trends like spicy tamarind have moved from street food to cocktail menus to global vodka launches.
To source these signals, her team goes to the edges of culture.
“We work with leading-edge consumers… We'll recruit people who are starting to live in different ways now.”
For IKEA, that meant studying a man living in a micro-van to save for the home he ultimately wants - a choice that reveals more about the future of housing than any macro trend report.
Trends vs fads: spotting what sticks
Chloe is careful to distinguish between what’s a fleeting fad and what will endure as a trend. “There’s a lot of noise out there,” she says. “Just because everyone is talking about something this week doesn’t mean it’s actually going to change behaviour over the long term.” Trends, she explains, seep into daily life, influence routines, and alter expectations; fads flare and vanish almost instantly.
This lens is crucial when translating early signals into product pipelines. “You can’t just chase what’s popular right now,” Chloe continues. “If you do, you risk building something that doesn’t last, and the investment is lost.” Instead, she and her team look for behaviours that are persistent, adaptable, and culturally resonant. The difference can be subtle - a hashtag may spike one day, but the underlying behaviour, value shift, or need it represents could evolve over the years. Recognising that difference, she argues, is what separates truly innovative brands from those that follow the crowd.
By applying this filter, Chloe ensures that packaging, product formats, and even communication strategies are not reactive, but anticipatory. “We’re trying to design for what’s next, not just what’s trending this month,” she says.
The beauty acceleration
No category illustrates the speed of change quite like beauty, where childhood, adolescence and adulthood now blur on social media’s infinite scroll.
Chloe laughs, recalling her 10-year-old niece: “She wanted a 15-pound lip balm… you're like 10 years of age, why do you want this?”
But for this new generation, the algorithm is both mirror and mentor. High-potency ingredients, previously reserved for adults, now appear in the routines of children who “don’t need to use a retinol,” but see peers doing so.
Beauty brands are now grappling with ethical dilemmas and the profound transformation of ageing itself.
“You look at the women in their 50s now… You wouldn't even know they're 50… what does ageing look like anymore?”
Routine complexity has exploded. And now, even the act of building a skincare routine is automated:
“We've just written a piece on how ChatGPT is informing beauty routines… it will tell you a very detailed beauty routine of how you get the best bang for your buck… people are using that now rather than going to dermatologists.”
The consumer has not only changed - they’ve become algorithmically empowered.
Innovation in an age of saturation
If patterns are shifting quickly, the market is moving even faster. AI has democratised trend prediction.
“Everyone has access to the same data… anyone can type into ChatGPT, I'm creating a new vodka, what flavour should I make? You're all going to get the same results.”
The companies that thrive will be the ones willing to go deeper - and earlier.
Yet even the best ideas now face brutal conditions: timelines that once allowed a product years to prove itself have shrunk to mere months.
“If no one discovers it, it's lost… innovation is really tough to cut through.”
Which is why packaging, often a late consideration, must now be developed in lockstep with formula, claims, naming, channel, and marketing.
“You have to think about all of it at the start,” said Chloe. “Or none of it works.”
When packaging is the innovation
Chloe illustrates the point with two cleaning bottles. One, the classic chemical-heavy trigger spray that “lives under the sink.” The other - a smaller, shorter, translucent pack created for China, “lives next to the sink.”
“Because it was a lot smaller, it's much more ergonomic,” she said. “You can see through it, it looks like water… We called it surface mist.”
The name and the new packaging form transformed daily cleaning behaviour.
“It feels much lighter, it feels much safer, less chemical. Just by changing the packaging, it became an entirely new thing.”
This is the frontier where Chloe works: the subtle alchemy of language, form, behaviour, and culture.
Some packs, of course, will never change.
“Not every brand needs to change its pack. There are going to be some that are just going to be iconic, like the Coca-Cola bottle.”
But for everyone else - beauty, cleaning, alcohol, food - the future belongs to the brands that can read the early signals, translate them intelligently, and package them in ways that help people live differently.
Because the truth is simple: the future doesn’t arrive in 2030 or 2050. It’s already here, unfolding in the hands of teenagers, single-person households, micro-van dwellers, and algorithm-guided skincare obsessives. The job, Chloe says, is to pay attention.
And then design for what happens next.
See these ideas in action and explore the possibilities for yourself - from cutting-edge materials and innovative formats to how they translate seamlessly into filling and packing lines. Register now for your free visitor pass to Packaging Innovations & Empack and catch Chloe’s session live, alongside the full breadth of the show floor.