Written by Jan De Roeck
Marketing Director, Esko
Ask any brand today where their biggest frustrations lie in bringing new products to market, and you’ll hear a remarkably consistent story: it simply takes too long. In fact, nine out of ten brands now call speed to market their top priority.
We live in a world where consumer expectations move faster than ever. Product ideas can go viral overnight. So-called “TikTok brands” use the social media channel which they’re named after to try out multiple ideas, and hope for one of them to be picked up and go viral. Social media can validate or kill concepts in days, sometimes hours. But when the moment comes to capitalize on that momentum, the industry too often hits a wall, especially in packaging. Design, artwork, and prepress cycles stretch for weeks, and precious time evaporates while competitors seize the opportunity.
To win today’s innovation race, brands and their supply chain partners must rethink not just tasks, but the entire workflow. Incremental tweaks no longer cut it. The next leap forward demands a fundamentally different operating model — one built on cloud technology, automation, and increasingly, agentic AI.
The Real Bottleneck Isn’t Creativity — It’s Everything After
In many organizations, packaging is the last piece of the NPD puzzle, and therefore, is the most time compressed. Upstream teams take the time they need, sometimes more, and by the time a design reaches production, timelines have shrunk to a fraction of the original window. Add the growing number of iterations, SKU variations, and shorter production runs, and the pressure compounds dramatically.
Approval cycles also add to the frustration as they are often complex and multi-tier hierarchically structured. Multiple iterations are necessary to get things right because from the onset, data is unstructured, not validated, and thus not accessible or available. And an increasingly complex regulatory landscape doesn’t particularly help with this challenge.
Yet packaging is also one of the strongest levers for standing out on the shelf. Getting it wrong delays launch, or worse, destroys brand equity and reputation. Running this “last mile to the consumer” too slowly hands competitive advantage to someone else. As today’s marketplace becomes more crowded, speed doesn’t just support competitiveness — it defines it. Even being “slightly late to the party” can mean losing the race entirely.
The Paradox of the Modern NPD Process
Let’s call this an uncomfortable paradox: in early-stage ideation, brands have become remarkably agile. Rapid validation using hyper realistic 3D renders, mocked up in real environments and tested through social media, has made “fail fast” a standard mindset.
But when a concept finally hits the mark — when feedback is enthusiastic and the idea goes viral — scaling up production becomes the bottleneck. Packaging designs still take, on average, multiple weeks to move from briefing to press-ready artwork.
Momentum evaporates. The market moves on. And so, the very processes designed to protect quality are the same ones holding back speed.
The Hard Data: Where the Time Really Goes
Across thousands of workflow data points from brand customers using Esko WebCenter, three stages consume the bulk of time:
Brief creation: 9 days on average, 42 days for the slowest.
Artwork creation: 31 days on average, 61 for the slowest.
Prepress: 25 days on average, 57 for the slowest.
This is all but an agile pipeline. It’s a six‑month obstacle course disguised as a workflow.
And yet I still hear leaders ask, “Why does it take so long?” The better question is: Why are we still okay with a process that was never built for speed in the first place?
Why the System Is Slow by Design
The problem isn’t a single step. It’s the sum of systemic issues:
- Iterative approval loops — rework, re-approval, more rework. No “right-first-time” culture.
- Inaccurate or outdated content from the start, leading to significant late-stage corrections.
- Incorrect execution vs specifications, often because of unclear or manually compiled briefs.
- Siloed operations, with teams passing files via email and lacking centralized asset management.
- Skill gaps, both at brand owners and converters, where tribal knowledge is unevenly distributed.
Individually, each issue looks solvable. Together, they create a structural drag that no amount of overtime will fix.
The Path Forward: Reinventing the Workflow
To truly accelerate speed to market, the industry must move beyond incremental improvements and embrace systemic transformation. That’s where the Esko S2 platform comes in, a unified, data driven foundation that delivers:
- A single cloud-based source of truth for all assets and specifications.
- Automated workflows that enforce standards and reduce human touch points that slows processes.
- Agentic AI automates pre-check briefs, identifies inconsistencies, automates routine prepress tasks, and dramatically reduces iterations.
- Role-based access and governance, ensuring transparency and accountability.
- Full traceability across every stakeholder and every decision.
These aren’t just efficiencies. They’re enablers of a new operating model. The workflows of tomorrow won’t just be faster — they’ll be smarter, more resilient, and more collaborative. What’s more, they’ll never let quality out of sight.
A New Competitive Era
Speed to market without compromising quality is no longer a metric. It’s a competitive differentiator. Brands that compress packaging and artwork cycles will capture opportunities the moment they arise. Those that cling to old workflows risk missing the market entirely.
The industry is at an inflection point.
The question is no longer “Can we afford to modernize?” It’s “Can we afford not to?”
