Sarah Stevens our 2007 Cormack Innovation Awards Winner started her internship with us this week, learning about our company, injection moulding and the Solidworks 3D mechanical design software. Sarah has benefited from working with Tim Bird and Frag Woodall who have been helping her realize her award winning design which Cormack hope to commercialise soon.

Sarah is also enjoying the multicultural food experience of nearby Bankstown with its many Vietnamese and Middle Eastern restrauants.

With the opening of the MeadWest Vaco Calmar's plant in Wuxi China, Calmar has now the largest plant now in China for manufacturing trigger sprayers and lotion pumps. This purpose built facility has been built to service the growing Chinese domestic market as well as supply product through out Asia, Australia and the Pacific.

Calmar will now be supplying the best trigger sprayers built in China. Trigger sprayers built to Calmar's world renowned standards. Cormack Packaging is Calmar's licensee for Australia & New Zealand.

The Cormack Awards are judged by experienced people working in the FMCG or pharmaceutical industry. These judges make the Cormack Awards unique. Our entrants are not only judged on design criteria but importantly on the criteria that is meaningful in the commercial world. Therefore our winners know that their designs, their problem solving and their solutions will be regarded as valuable in the commercial world.

Our judges give up a day of their busy professional lives and we would like to thank for their time and their generosity.

Our judges this year were:

Anthi Liavas Commercial Divisional Head of Mars Foods

Paul Haberland Packaging Specialist Oceania Nestlé

Ros Pedersen-Court Senior Packaging Technologist Unilever

The full list of the Winners, Highly Commended and Finalists for the Cormack Awards are:

The Winners

1^st Place                Sarah Stevens                   Monash University

2^nd Place               Nicholas Cheung              New South Wales University

3^rd Place               Frank Maguire                   University of Technology Sydney

Highly Commended

Eugene Cheong                                                UNSW

James Kwong                                                    UNSW

Elise Chant                                                          UTS

Top 10 Finalists

Anneli Selvefors                                                 UNSW

Yee Kai Lee                                                         UTS

Stine Baust Rogeberg                                     UTS

Stan Raguine                                                      UNSW

 Sarah Stevens, a 2^nd year design student from Monash University has won the 6^th Annual Cormack Innovation Award presented in Sydney this week. Sarah is a 2^nd year Industrial Design student at Monash University's Caulfield campus.

Sarah won her award for her elegant design solution for the packaging of nails in a triangular form. Sarah's design gives the DIY handyman easy access to the nails as well as providing a secure way of transporting and storing them. Sarah's design is also easy to manufacture, easy to pack and looks great on retail shelves.

Sarah's design solves the frustration felt by many DIY people, with the current vacuum formed packaging of nails, packaging that is hard to open and harder to close.

Sarah's win is also ground breaking for the Cormack Awards as Sarah is the first student from Monash to win the award as well as our first interstate winner.

Apart from a cash prize and trophy, Sarah will be given the chance to work as a design intern with Cormack Packaging.

The Cormack Innovation Awards are in their 6^th year and are recognised as one of the more practically based awards for Industrial Design students in Australia. These Awards are practical as the design criteria are based on industry needs and are judged by leading industry practitioners working in FCMG, Beverage and Pharmaceutical companies - the same people that one day will be commissioning such designs in the commercial world.

Students from UTS, UNSW, Canberra University and Monash University competed for this year's award.

The quality of the designers that win our Cormack Innovation Award is being displayed by their success in other design competitions. Our 2005 winner, Frag Woodall is in the final 21 of the International Bicycle Design Competition. Frag has entered his Everglide bike design which can be found here. The numbers of entries this year were 922 from all over the world. Find out more information on the competition here.

Our 2006 Cormack Innovation Award winner, Brad Stebbings is one of the 3 finalists for the Breville Young Designer Award. Brad has entered his design for a Coffee Shakir.

Our Cormack Innovation Award is one of the most practical design competitions opened to industrial design students in Australia and it is great to see that the designers that win the Cormack with a great packaging idea, go on to be recognized for their ability in other design disciplines.

The talented design students that are competing for the Cormack Award have presented their initial ideas. The leaps of fresh, unfettered and innocent innovation displayed by these young designers was truly invigorating. We saw new takes on dispensing caps and trigger sprayers and many other ways to dispense lotions, gels and dry goods. Some of the ideas were so good that you know that they could go straight to the market and many others just need a bit of tweaking to be ready.

We can not wait to see their finalized designs in October!

As it is financial reporting time, we aim to provide you with concise information on the performance of the major consumer goods companies. It was our original intention to provide this in one post but now it seems better to provide them individually.

Nestlé has reported a great first half result that exceeded not only the analyst's predictions but also their own internal forecasts. Their growth was 8.4% up on last year's result. The growth included 5.3% real internal growth and 2% price increases.

Stand out performances came from their Nestlé Nutrition product group which grew at 10.5% and their Nestlé Waters group which grew at 10.3%. Even their monster Nescafé and Nestea brands grew around 10%.

The Nestlé press release is here.

Nestlé's result is outstanding in the ultra competitive but stable food sector. Commentators have attributed their result to their anticipation of the demand driven increases in raw material prices which Nestlé responded to by hedging and putting through price emptive price increases on their own products.

Nestlé also tightened their management controls and increased their corporate transparency by rolling out a new global IT platform. Lastly they were successful in containing costs with a number of projects.

The Financial Times provides more analysis here and here.

Strategy is an abused word in Australia as it is often confused with tactics. You can be regarded as strategic even if all you do, is vary the price of your products.

Strategy is all about choice, choosing to do something or choosing not to do something.

Michael E. Porter puts it like this:

" the essence of strategy is choosing a unique and valuable position rooted in systems of activities that are much more difficult to match."

Porter's HBR Article can be found here.

Getting to the strategic purity of Porter's is difficult for most companies as the hardest thing is to say no to some customers. However I have run across one Australian company that does not have that problem. ASP Plastics of St Marys in Sydney run by managing director Paul Brennan has a clear idea of what they do and don't do:

• They do NOT take business from their competitors. They do NOT compete on price.
• They DO find new niches and exploit them. If exploiting the new niche requires new skills, they find them.
• They do NOT get emotionally attached to any product. If its attractivesness falls, they walk away.

This is a simple list of "What we do and What we don't do" but it is working for ASP as parts of its business are growing at 300%!

Yes, the Cormack Awards are on again with design students from the leading universities competing for one of the most practical design competitions in Australia.

Students from the University of Technology Sydney, the University of New South Wales, the University of Canberra and Monash University are this year busily creating designs to meet the brief for the Cormack Award.

The Cormack Award is regarded as one of the most practical awards, as the competition criteria and judging is done by people working in FMCG, beverage and pharmaceutical companies, the same people that one day will be commissioning designs from these students.

The awards culminate in the Presentation Night which this year will be held in Sydney in October. Past winners of the award include Tim Bird and Frag Woodall who are both working with Cormack.