Absolut Paper Bottle.
Designing our future When your entire business is about creativity and innovation, it can sometimes be hard to create a straight-forward definition of what it is exactly that you do. Grow continuously redefines the scope of what it means to be a forward-thinking creative business partner, brand and experience transformer as well as an innovative industrial design agency.
designing products and services. Their offering spans the whole spectrum from brand strategy and concept creation, product and packaging development, marketing and communication, through to UX and digitalisation.
By Amanda Ottosson | Photos: Grow
Building the business on an everexpanding offer, Grow started life in 2004 as a brand-development agency. It’s since grown into an international business with offices not only in its native Stockholm, but also in Helsinki, London and Vancouver. Teaming up with a sustainable pulp and paper innovator early on the journey ignited their passion for sustainability, with the opportunity to create packaging that doesn’t cost the earth. “BillerudKorsnäs approached us to work together specifically on their futurefocused projects,” says Isabelle Dahlborg Lidström, head of design and creative di32 | Issue 137 | December 2021
rector. “They had grand ideas and a need to get closer to their brand owners. They wanted to approach a crisps company to see if there was an opportunity to create paper-based packaging, but they needed someone to make that a reality. They gave us free reign to conceptualise what we thought it could look and feel like.” This holistic way of understanding their own role as creative catalysts has informed the journey from the start, and has meant that the business has kept transforming. Today, Grow offers support throughout the whole journey, from brand and experience transformation to
“We’re privileged in that we get to be a part of the whole process. We often come in well before the product is conceived to guide the client throughout the whole process. We’ll advise on what sort of machinery is needed to create the product and the packaging, and we stay with the business on that whole journey to bring it to the end consumer, as well as what happens after that. There aren’t a lot of agencies that get that opportunity,” says Axel Brechensbauer, director of concept design. Future gazing Four years ago, the business teamed up with Digitalist to expand their digital of-
