When Andreja Pogačar was choosing a company name to develop innovative sustainable packaging, all the desired domains were taken. A little impatient, she tried dodo and dodopack, and it worked. "The extinct bird cannot be resurrected, but it can remind us that focusing on human needs alone, without regard for nature and other living things, is not a solution, but rather a disaster."
Dodopack d.o.o. develops customised packaging for clients in paper, corrugated board and biodegradable composites. In addition to development, prototyping and design, they also offer small and large batch production and a range of existing solutions. They take great care in selecting the most suitable material, designing the optimal packaging structure, avoiding unnecessary printing (while still pursuing the goal of graphic visibility) and using as little glue as possible through thoughtful structural design.
Andreja is an industrial designer by training, she completed her Master's degree at the Academy of Fine Arts and received the Prešeren Student Prize. She is furthering her knowledge of sustainable packaging during her PhD studies at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering. She is also the recipient of the Slovenian Oscar for Packaging.
As regular jobs were scarce during the 2010 crisis, she took a job as a structural packaging designer. It was not her first choice, but it soon became her greatest passion. She had always been good at technical things, geometry, and the job of a structural designer took her completely by storm. She says - the harder it is, the more she enjoys it.
She was always curious about the whole process, but in her safe job at the time, she mostly had to stick to her assigned area. At the same time, many of her questions, especially about recyclability, remained unanswered. After a few years of freelancing and a project at the Institute of Chemistry, the decision to start her own company was ripe. "Now I have the opportunity to carry out the whole service from start to finish."
Before starting her own business, she was guided to Catapult by her partner, also an entrepreneur. "They are good there," he insisted, because Trbovlje seemed far from Radovljica. Now, she says she is grateful for the advice and all the support from her mentor Urša and the whole Katapult team. "At that time, I was looking for help with things that were foreign to me and really unnecessary, such as - the process of opening a company, the social contract, accounting, warehousing. But I also got invaluable business advice, connections with manufacturers and a wonderful team I could always turn to."
Today, 70% of her customers are from abroad, and she designs packaging for products ranging from robots to her father's liqueurs and Tr'glav spirits. She has made a name for herself in the field of innovative sustainable packaging development, and many companies seek her out because of her experience and her projects, and because they understand the process. The demands of clients in the area of recyclability are increasing and legislation is tightening.
Yet, "All the infrastructure behind recycling cannot process all the rubbish we produce. We should be educating people more about reducing consumption than about recycling," he concludes, already making plans to a new innovative project in the field of sustainable packaging.
