“It’s up to us to make refilling attractive,” Mandana Vahedi, Planet B

What made you choose packaging as a career, and what inspires you about the sector?

Mandana Vahedi - I’ve always been fascinated by the products that make you stop in front of a shelf and reach for them without quite knowing why. Often, that’s packaging at work: a colour, a shape, the weight of a product in your hand.

I started my career in luxury beauty where nothing is left to chance, and that background is still one of my biggest strengths. It taught me uncompromising standards for quality and finish, a sense of what makes a product truly desirable, and how to make formula, packaging and brand story work as one.

But I also saw how hard it is to make a packaging truly sustainable without losing that magic, and that’s what made me want to tackle the technical side.

Joining Planet B let me move to the other side of the table: instead of choosing from existing solutions, I could help build new ones. What I love most now is turning a technical constraint into a chance to rethink the whole system: the format, the gesture and the consumer’s relationship with the product. Our mission is to make sustainable choices easy, with products free from single-use plastic that are high-quality, simple to use and better for both people and the planet.

At Planet B, I’ve taken on a much more technical side. In large groups, technical work is handled by specialist teams. Here, I also cover formula development, project management, and regulatory compliance, which gives me a 360° view of the product. Packaging is where I see the greatest potential for impact, and having the full picture helps me make choices that work for the formula, the consumer and the regulations. I work hand in hand with suppliers, labs and manufacturers to turn bold ideas into real products, like our latest launches: aluminium can refills for WONDR shampoo, shower gel and conditioner, and a sugarcane-based bottle for POWR liquid laundry detergent.

This year’s theme is “In the Spotlight”. What is one challenge or opportunity in the packaging industry that you believe deserves more attention?

Mandana Vahedi - We talk a lot about new materials and technical performance, but much less about what happens after launch: convincing people to change their habits, to refill instead of throwing away, to adopt a new gesture.

Refills have been around for about ten years, yet consumers still see the same few systems across brands and categories, like the pouch or the insert for beauty products, and almost always in plastic. Last February, I came to Paris Packaging Week looking for new formats and materials, and I couldn’t find anything that met our requirements. At Planet B, refills can’t contain any plastic at all, not even an insert in the cap. Yet almost every refill on offer was plastic, and they all looked the same.

There’s a real opportunity to go further, in design as well as materials. Instead of settling for well-known solutions, brands can challenge suppliers and manufacturers to rethink refill systems from scratch. Refilling still asks people to change their habits, so it’s up to us to make it attractive. A new, desirable format is exactly what catches a consumer’s eye, and it makes the change feel exciting rather than like a compromise. I see it as a chance to pioneer how we’ll consume tomorrow.

What would you like to change about the industry?

Mandana Vahedi - I’d like to make innovation more accessible to smaller brands. They’re brimming with ideas and willing to take bold risks to stand out in a saturated market, which makes them natural testing grounds for new packaging. Yet many of the most promising solutions are only available at very high minimum order quantities. Even when they’re within reach, the prices don’t fit our margins. That’s still the main challenge I face. It holds back innovation, and sustainability too: local and European production often ends up out of reach, so we sometimes have to source from much further away.

From where I stand, the paradox is that large groups have access to these innovations but are often more cautious about risk, and they tend to change mainly when regulations require it. As a result, some supplier innovations never get anywhere: the big players aren’t interested, and the smaller ones can’t access them. If suppliers found ways to work with smaller volumes, we’d see new materials and formats reach consumers much faster!

Which packaging innovation or trend excites you most?

Mandana Vahedi - Refill and modular systems: formats where the durable part stays with the consumer and only a minimal, highly recyclable refill is replaced.

At WONDR, we’ve applied this across several categories. For our hair oils and face serums, we offer a reusable glass bottle with a 100% recycled aluminium tube refill, made in the EU. Most recently, we extended it to shampoo, shower gel and conditioner, with an aluminium can refill that fits into a reusable pump bottle. The response from our consumers has been really positive, which proves that a plastic-free refill can be just as desirable as a conventional format.

What excites me most is that these systems ask us to redesign the consumer’s gesture, not just swap one material for another. That adds another layer of challenge: the formula, the gesture and the packaging all have to tell the same story, so the experience feels coherent and intuitive from the very first use.

Who has inspired you in your career, and what is the most valuable lesson you’ve learned from them?

Mandana Vahedi - If I had to pick just one person, I’d be leaving out too many! I’ve been lucky that every role I’ve had so far has been built on collaboration. From my first internship mentor to my current manager, along with the colleagues and external partners I work with every day, each has taught me something different, whether about consumer behaviour, technical feasibility or managing complex projects.

When it comes to packaging specifically, the most valuable lesson came from my team at Planet B, and especially my manager, Manush Barvar, himself a Paris Packaging Week Future Leader in 2024: don’t settle for what’s already established. He has pushed me to challenge the status quo and be bolder in my choices, because that’s often where the most interesting solutions are found.

What advice would you give the next generation of packaging professionals?

Mandana Vahedi - Be curious and be persistent. Keep a constant eye on what’s being developed, including outside your own category, so you can be first to market rather than follow existing standards. And accept that failed tests and endless back-and-forth with suppliers are part of the job: persistence is what turns a promising idea into a product on the shelf!

What does being selected as a Future Leader mean to you?

Mandana Vahedi - It’s recognition of a lot of work behind the scenes: the trials, the iterations and the compromises between sustainability, cost and industrial feasibility. It’s also an encouragement to keep pushing for packaging that is both responsible and desirable, and a chance to show that smaller, agile brands can lead innovation too.

It’s also a nice full-circle moment. I came to Paris Packaging Week for the first time last February. It was my very first trade show, and I arrived with a long list of suppliers to meet and talks to attend. If someone had told me then that I’d be back the following year as a speaker, I wouldn’t have believed them!