Insights / Branding
Is your brand celebration-ready? As festive seasons draw closer, brands and businesses will only have one thing on their minds: festive sales.
After all, everyone will be out shopping for their loved ones and decorating their houses to welcome guests, making it the perfect opportunity for your products to capture new customers and retain old ones. And while businesses could slap the holiday’s usual colour theme on their packaging design and call it a day, you need to realize that there’s more to it in order to make a product stand out on the shelves.
Let’s jump straight in and learn how to create better festive packaging designs for your products!
Part 1: The Important Mini-Steps
Research & Identify
The first step to better festive packaging design is to identify the products you’ll be selling in the various upcoming holidays.
Aside from the product’s actual benefits, understanding which products are popular amongst your customers gives you useful insights on the reasons that attract people to your product specifically. This can lead to well-produced packaging designs as you’ll know what customers have taken a liking to, which you may then utilize as an effective competitive advantage to make you stand out amongst a sea of lookalike products.
Even if your brand is new in the market, research is imperative. Find out how you can outperform the market leaders by differentiating through your packaging.
Design and Create Mockups
Once you’re past the research phase, you can start drawing up some ideas on the physical aspects (i.e. creating a mockup) before moving onto the actual design. While it's tempting to jump straight into designing, it’s not recommended as your finished design might not fit properly with the packaging when printed.
Start with your measurements and know them! You need to understand how each of the packaging’s sides fold together to house your product so it is not only protected but presented well.
The next technicality to consider is the finishing of your packaging. Here are some common types of finishes you can consider for your packaging:
Gloss
Gloss is the most popular type of finishing used amongst brands.
Matte
Matte is usually used in organic products for its natural texture.
Foil Stamping
Foil Stamping is often used to communicate a sense of elegance or the product’s premium quality.
Embossed & Debossed
Embossing or Debossing is used when you want to make a certain visual element ‘pop’ through raising it (embossing) or receding it (debossing).
There are other finishing options as well that you can check out here, but as long as you’ve got a solid mockup, you’ll be able to communicate those ideas to the designers you’re working with.
Part 2a: Getting The 'Mood' Right For Your Packaging Design
In the days leading up to the festival, I’m sure you can easily distinguish which products are in the ‘festive spirit’ based on the primary and complementary/secondary colours used. For instance, red, green, and white are the obvious color choices to attract customers who are looking for Christmas products, while various shades of red are used for Chinese New Year and green and purple during Hari Raya. But getting the colours right is only one part of the equation, as you need to consider other visual elements such as characters, objects, patterns, and other features that resemble the season. There is a festive “mood” that needs to be captured.
A useful tool you can create to help with that is a moodboard:
As shown above, a moodboard is simply a collage or collection of visuals, materials, text, and so on that helps invoke a particular style and feel for the piece of work you intend to create. Think of it as a style guide to keep you on track with your visuals so you can accurately capture the “atmosphere” or “ambience” within your designs.
From there, you can reference the moodboard and begin designing your packaging! Don’t be afraid to switch the colours up a little if you find the typical colours overused and be sure to experiment with innovative elements as well.
Part 2b: Product Presentation On The Inside
Customer experience is a value that’s highly sought after amongst brands and businesses as they need to elevate themselves above competitors by offering more than just their products alone. So how do you improve customer experience aside from giving them the best products in the world?
Two words: product presentation.
Your product’s exterior display on the shelves can only do so much, but the inside of the packaging plays a vital role in wowing your customers before they even get to using your products. Some call this the “unboxing experience”. Your goal should be to recreate the memorable moment of absolute joy that children get when they unwrap gifts, but with your customers and your product.The evidence is shown in “unboxing” videos, which are a hit within certain industries (beauty, toys, tech, etc.). If your product’s packaging design gets shown on video, not only will you be impressing your current customer base, but also attracting new customers as they would like to experience the same things too.
Here is an example:
Part 3: Think About The World Through Sustainability
Going “green” is an increasingly prominent movement these days and consumers are also becoming more socially responsible towards the environment. Hence, brands and businesses have to start considering sustainable alternatives when selling to them, especially in their use of product packaging.
This is even more evident during the holidays as there is a surge of consumption with seasonal products, leading to a large waste of materials once the customers have finished using the products.
But what do businesses get from going sustainable aside from preserving the environment and an applause for their actions?
For one, consumers (especially Gen Z) are likely to choose brands and businesses who opt for the sustainable route. This youthful generation is often more proactive in fighting for sustainability, as they grow concerned for the future and foresee inheriting the world’s problems left behind by the previous generation.
With that being said, here are some factors to consider in designing your packaging:
Do You Really Need That Much Packaging?
Although we’ve talked about going the extra mile to make your customers feel special with great packaging on the inside, there’s still a fine line between being “extra” and wasteful.
Take this comparison as an example:
If you were selling something like this, you could decide which option would produce less waste and would also be able to be recycled or reused for other purposes, instead of a one-time use for its packaging. This brings us to the next point…
What Other Packaging Materials Could You Use?
Ask yourself, can your product’s packaging be made from recyclable and renewable materials? Sourcing for alternatives might be difficult, but the world we live in is becoming increasingly innovative with each passing day.
For example, this Taiwanese company called Green in Hand created a sustainable yet aesthetically packaging design to sell its rice. The packaging is made from materials such as kraft paper, tissue paper, and paper rattan, which can be recycled and reused.
Assess How To Create Less Waste
Although creating sustainable packaging helps in preserving the environment, another pressing goal is to reverse the effects of climate change. One way of doing so is to identify how your brand can create less waste from your products.
With regards to that, these are some strategies brands could use to reduce the waste they create from their products (which is different for every industry). For some, this means reducing shipping box sizes to decrease the weight, resulting in smaller shipping costs. Others could reconsider their product or packaging design in order to minimize the use of material as much as possible. The most important thing is that you need to understand your customer’s consumption behavior and create a packaging that helps optimize the product use without creating unnecessary waste.
Once you’ve got these nitty-gritty things down, creating better packaging design for festivals and holidays that help your products stand out and attract customers becomes much easier. While some brands may have a clear vision on how to go about it, others might have yet to discover that “eureka” idea for their designs.
Instead of working through that frustrating headache, our agency exists to help you solve that problem through a variety of creative services, specialized to bring your brand and ideas to life and grow it into its fullest potential. Let’s make that happen with just one click!
