Every unit a brand sells passes through packaging that the customer physically opens, and right now most of that surface carries nothing but a barcode and some legal small print. A single QR code or NFC point on the pack itself — not the product, the box or the label around it — turns that moment into a page the brand controls, reachable by anyone who opens the pack, whether they bought it from the brand's own site, a marketplace, or a retailer three steps removed from any direct relationship. That's connected packaging: not a new material or a redesigned box, just a scannable point that resolves to something worth landing on.
Why packaging is often the easier place to start
Putting a unique identifier on the product itself — sewn into a garment label, moulded into a plastic housing, etched onto a metal part — usually means touching the manufacturing line, the tooling, or a supplier relationship that's expensive to change mid-run. Packaging is a much softer surface. A QR code printed on a box, a sleeve, or a care card can be added at the print stage of an existing packaging run, without altering the product itself or the process that makes it. For a brand that wants to test whether a connected experience is worth the investment before committing to changes further up the supply chain, packaging is the low-friction way to find out. It's also the point most brands already control most tightly, since packaging design usually sits with marketing or brand rather than production engineering, which makes it faster to greenlight than a change to the product itself.
What actually goes on the page
The page a packaging QR code resolves to only earns its place if it's more useful to open than to ignore. In practice that means unboxing guidance for anything with a setup step, care and use instructions that don't fit on a folded insert, a straightforward registration prompt that captures the first piece of first-party data a brand gets from that customer, and — increasingly — the sustainability and recyclability information that's getting harder to fit legibly on a physical label as more of it becomes a regulatory expectation rather than a nice-to-have. For categories with a resale or take-back angle, the same page can carry a trade-in or return prompt at exactly the moment someone's deciding whether to keep the packaging or the product at all. None of this needs to be built at once: a brand adds one or two of these blocks first, sees which ones get used, and expands from there.
Packaging as a compliance location, not a compliance shortcut
The EU's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781) sets out, in Article 10(1)(b), that the digital data carrier for a product's digital product passport must be physically present on the product itself, on its packaging, or on documentation that accompanies it — packaging is one of three permitted locations, not a workaround for putting the carrier somewhere else. That matters for connected packaging in a specific way: if a future delegated act under this Regulation requires a passport for a given product category, printing the required data carrier on the packaging can satisfy that placement rule. But the packaging page a brand builds for onboarding, care instructions, and registration doesn't have to be the same page as the regulatory passport, and for most brands right now it isn't, because no delegated act has yet set the detailed passport content requirements for most product categories — that detail is still being worked through category by category, and brands should treat any specific date for their own sector as provisional until the relevant delegated act is adopted. We cover what's actually confirmed versus still provisional, category by category, in our piece on digital product passport requirements. Building the packaging channel now for the commercial reasons above means the location is already correct if and when a passport requirement lands on top of it.
There's a separate, faster-moving shift worth planning around too: GS1's Sunrise 2027 initiative, which has retailers and brands working toward point-of-sale systems that can read 2D barcodes like QR codes by the end of 2027. That's an industry readiness goal set by GS1 and its retail members, not a legal deadline, and adoption will vary by retailer and market — but a packaging QR code built on the GS1 Digital Link standard now means the same code that drives the customer page today is already in the right format if a retailer's point-of-sale system starts reading it directly later.
What a packaging-led rollout tends to involve
Packaging-led connected experiences generally follow a similar shape regardless of category: a single pack format gets a QR code or NFC point added at the next print or production run, the resulting page starts with one or two of the content blocks above rather than all of them, and the brand watches which parts of the page actually get used before deciding what to add. Food and drink brands tend to lead with recipe or usage content and traceability information; beauty and personal care lean toward ingredient detail and registration; anything with a repair or refill option tends to put that front and centre because it's the block most likely to bring the customer back a second time. The common thread across all of them is that the packaging becomes the entry point to a relationship the brand didn't have access to before, not a one-off unboxing flourish.
Where to start
Pick one pack, not the whole range. Add a GS1 Digital Link QR code to the next print run of a single product's packaging, build a page with the one or two content blocks most relevant to that product — care instructions, registration, or sustainability information are usually the fastest to justify — and see what customers actually scan for before deciding what the second pack format gets. SmartLinks is free until you go live, so there's no reason to wait for a wider packaging redesign before testing whether the channel is worth having at all. For the customer-relationship case underneath all of this — why owning that first scan matters commercially, regulation aside — see our piece on the fashion brand case for a digital product passport.
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Sources: Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 (ESPR), Article 10(1)(b) — https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1781/oj