Knockout Packaging
A legacy paper company, reinvented as a sustainable packaging brand. Then re-energized years later, for a market that had finally caught up.
The company that had everything but a brand
Fishers Paperboard had fifty years in the paper supply business, relationships built across the industry, and a clear read on where packaging was heading. What it did not have was a name, a face, or a story for the new company it was about to launch - an advisor and supplier of sustainable packaging for manufacturers who were being pushed, by regulation and by their own customers, to do better. Heritage was the asset. The catch was that fifty years in paper supply meant nothing to the buyer they now needed to win… a small-to-mid manufacturer choosing between a commodity supplier and a partner who could actually help them rethink their packaging. They needed a brand that could hold both. The pedigree of a fifty-year operator, and the energy of a challenger.
Rethink Sustainability
I renamed Fishers Paperboard to Knockout and built the brand around one idea: packaging that knocks out unsustainable practice. The essence was Rethink Sustainability. Not sustainability as a compliance box to tick… sustainability as the smarter commercial choice. The messaging platform ran on a single word, (Re)think, and three moves: — Rethink what materials you use. — Rethink where you find efficiencies. — Rethink how technology earns trust. That gave the team a story for every conversation - from the material science, to the shipping math, to blockchain-backed certifications. The tagline, Packaging with Impact, carried the double meaning: environmental impact, and the impact of a package that actually lands.
A mark with force
The identity paired a deep emerald with a bright, almost electric green - nature and energy in the same system. The mark is a K knocked out of a globe: an expanding, growing form that reads as both a punch and a planet. I delivered the full system. Logo and identity, the messaging framework, stationery, and the first website. Knockout launched with a brand that punched well above its category.
So they came back. Not to a pitch, not to a new agency they had to educate from scratch… back to the person who built the brand in the first place.
Bringing the brand forward
The foundations were sound, so this was not a rebrand. It was a re-energizing. I revisited the positioning for a market that had matured, sharpened the messaging so Knockout reads as the expert partner rather than one more green supplier, and brought the (Re)think platform forward into how the brand shows up today.
Getting found, then getting chosen
Buyers no longer find a packaging supplier the way they did when Knockout launched. They search, they ask answer engines, and increasingly they ask AI. A brand that is not structured to be found and cited in those channels is invisible, no matter how good the work is. So the current engagement rebuilt Knockout's marketing around discovery: — Search, answer-engine and generative-engine optimization (SEO, AEO, GEO) so Knockout surfaces where buyers actually look. — Structured data, a proper FAQ architecture, and clean metadata, so both search engines and AI can read, trust and cite the brand. — A content engine that turns Knockout's expertise into inbound - feeding a lead-generation funnel instead of relying on the outbound chase. The goal was simple: turn a strong brand into a brand that generates its own demand.
I built Knockout's past. Years later, they trusted me to build its next.
That is not a portfolio entry. That is the point of the studio.