SPECIAL COVID-19 25 DS SMITH EMBARKING IN A FUN AND EDUCATIONAL PROJECT Ds Smith manufactured and distributed 100,000 card- board models of aeroplanes and helicopters for children to build at home during the school holidays in France. Employees volunteered at Saint-Just-en-Chaussee site in the L’Oise region, France, on the 10th and 14th of April, producing and packaging the toys. Carrefour, the su- permarket chain, distributed the toys through its hyper- markets across France from the 17th April.“As a strategic industrial player, after the protection of the health and safety of all our employees, our priority is to meet the demand of our customers. However, we thought it was important to make a gesture of solidarity, by making our DS Smith’s creative talents made available to children. creative talents available to children,” explains Thibault Laumonier, Managing Director of DS Smith Packaging France. A DS Smith team, comprising of design, commercial and production experts worked together to design the toys, managed production and ensured these were available to as many children as possible. The objective was to offer children, confined to their homes during the Covid-19 pandemic, with a fun and educational project. In addition to the donation, DS Smith has launched a contest on Facebook and Instagram, where children can share their work by tag- ging DS Smith (@DSSmithGroup) or Carrefour (@carrefourfrance) with a prize for the most popular post. “This project has really united the teams internally. Beyond our daily strategic ser- vice to customers, this project has shown another side of our solidarity. Design Production, Logistics, Legal, Marketing, and other departments have proactively contributed ” says Armand Chaigne, Marketing and Communication France, in charge of the project.