Packaging

As a brand agency, we approach every project and problem we solve with an unwavering focus on the brand. With deep expertise in consumer goods, the brands we build are often expressed primarily or most immediately through package design.

Packaging is more than a container. It is one of the most intimate ways a person will experience your brand. They take it in with their eyes, hold it in their hands, bring it into their home, and even put it to their lips. Packaging represents more consumer daily impressions than any other communications medium. 

Packaging is an opportunity. Of all the brand touchpoints experienced by consumers, none offer a more potent chance to connect emotionally with your audience. It is reported that 72% of Americans state that a product’s packaging design influences their purchase decisions. For established brands, packaging is as vital as marketing for maintaining recognition and building trust and affinity. For new brands or limited budgets, packaging is your marketing and advertising.

Packaging Design Psychology & Emotions

Understanding the psychology and emotional landscape of product packaging is a game-changer that can profoundly influence consumer perception and behavior. It can give your brand a strategic edge and a competitive advantage in a marketplace. 

Emotions play a significant role in shoppers’ decision-making and often overshadow rational considerations. Tapping into emotional triggers, such as nostalgia, joy, or a sense of belonging, can elicit powerful responses that influence purchase decisions. Understanding your audience’s emotional mindset empowers packaging design that fosters authentic connection and cultivates brand loyalty.

The best packaging design creates an opportunity for your products to entice your audience, pique curiosity, tell a story, inform, surprise, and delight. It is a powerful asset that fights for your brand in stores and online, seizing shoppers’ attention with shelf presence and scroll-stopping impact.

Product Perception & Perceived Value of Your Brand

The benefits of strong package design go beyond emotional connection and purchase intent. Expertly designed packaging layers cues that tell consumers a myriad of things about your brand without them having to read a single word. Deft combinations of color, shape, imagery, materiality, texture, and words can immediately evoke an essence of sophisticated luxury, youthful exuberance, established dependability, or rebellious spirit. Product packaging design should activate communication strategy.

Effective packaging design artfully weaves verbal and visual cues to craft a compelling narrative that captivates consumers. Packaging is a promise of the value of the product inside, building and growing the perceived value of your brand. Combining a bold packaging promise with a quality product experience is lightning in a bottle.

Packaging Design Creates Brand Recognition, Trust, & Affinity

Smart, creative packaging design is vital to growing your brand. Brands grow by creating recognition, fostering affinity, and building trust. 

Market research shows that the less a seller is recognized along a customer journey, the more likely shoppers are to buy from another business, especially if the offerings are similar. With more consumer impressions than any other medium, packaging plays an immense role in creating brand recognition. A great example is our packaging design services for Austin Beerworks. By boldly contrasting the ubiquitous packaging design trends in craft beer, we created recognition for a small craft brewery that spanned beyond its home and state across the globe. 

Visual hierarchy, message pacing, color billboarding, and impression hierarchy all maximize visibility, brand recognition, and retention. We carefully consider each of these and even employ eye-tracking software to optimize recognition to lightning speed. 

Packaging is a vital tool for building trust in your brand. It promises the value of the products inside. Product perception directly drives purchase decisions and builds and grows the perceived value of your brand. Materiality, construction, package architecture, production finishes, and visual and verbal design tell your audience your brand deserves their trust— or does not. Getting packaging production right is such a crucial factor for inspiring trust that we have a number of team members whose jobs focus solely on that piece of the packaging design puzzle.

Shoppers can recognize multiple brands on the shelf and trust that more than one delivers the same value. Retail shoppers care about more than costs. When multiple brands offer similar items at similar prices and levels of trust, buyers choose the option they like more. Packaging design is a key instrument in building that affinity.

Packaging can help spark affinity for your brand in many ways. Aesthetics, tone, personality, and point of view are just a few factors that can impact people in different ways. A great example of this is the packaging design and unboxing experiences we built for Tecovas and Everlywell. Both show a carefully crafted and artfully paced experience, with meaningful moments designed into every step, from the minute they are received and opened. Great packaging design doesn’t just tell a story about the product. It tells a story about the benefits it brings the buyer, how it can make them feel, and what it says about them to the world.

Innovation, Trends, & Sustainability

As a brand agency focused on packaging design services, we harbor a deep love for packaging from the past and present. A quick scan of our design studio will reveal product and food and beverage packaging from multiple locations, often spanning the globe: vintage oil cans from the Northeast, a box of tinned fish from Sweden, dispensary bottles from the South, and hundreds of other graphic design artifacts squirreled away in the name of research. On any given workday there are custom packaging supplies, material samples, and prototypes shipping in or out of the studio. For a packaging design company, research and obsession are close cousins. 

Innovation

We study packaging design from yesterday and today, but what about tomorrow? Innovation is at the heart of effective packaging design. In an era where consumers are constantly seeking new experiences, brands must stay ahead of the curve with innovative packaging solutions. This can include anything from smart packaging with QR codes that provide additional product information to eco-friendly materials that speak to environmentally conscious consumers. 

If you’d like to see an even more whimsical and dramatic example of innovation’s impact, check out the world’s first 99-pack of beer.

Market Trends

Packaging design is shooting at a moving target. Consumer preferences and market trends change frequently and shift wildly. Micro-eras of minimalism give way to maximalism, and classical aesthetics usher in the emergence of brutalism in design. Keeping up with market trends is essential for staying relevant and competitive. That does not necessarily mean that you should follow them— a healthy brand should have its eyes on the horizon and ensure its packaging doesn’t drown in a “sea of sameness.”

Sustainability

In recent years, sustainability has become a critical concern for consumers and brands alike. Environmentally friendly packaging reduces the ecological footprint and appeals to a growing segment of eco-conscious consumers. Brands that prioritize sustainable packaging design to send the world a message that they are thoughtful, responsible, and forward-thinking, which can enhance their reputation and customer loyalty. As a packaging design agency, we aim to integrate design for reuse, compostability, zero waste, alternative plastics, and other solutions into the conversation each time we develop packaging.

Wrap Up

It’s difficult to overstate the value of packaging services in building and growing your brand. Custom boxes, bottles, pouches, and vials impact far more than supply chain. Investing in smart packaging design is a wise strategic move for entrepreneurs, marketing managers, and company leaders looking to elevate their brands. It’s not just about making your product look good; it’s about creating an experience that connects with consumers on multiple levels.

Whether you’re launching a new product or rebranding an existing one, don’t underestimate the power of exceptional packaging design. It’s an investment that pays off in consumer trust, loyalty, and, ultimately, your bottom line. You’ll be happy you made it.

Packaging Design FAQ

How does packaging design impact consumer purchasing decisions?

Packaging design influences purchase decisions through multiple psychological pathways operating simultaneously. At a functional level, effective packaging communicates essential product information and benefits in the split-second window when consumers scan shelves. 

At a sensory level, packaging design creates immediate impressions about product quality, authenticity, and relevance through strategic color choices, material selection, structural design, and typography. At an emotional level, distinctive packaging triggers specific feelings and associations that differentiate your product from competitors. Research consistently shows that consumers attribute product characteristics based on packaging cues—perceiving identical products as premium or basic, traditional or innovative, trustworthy or questionable based solely on packaging design. 

In increasingly crowded retail environments where the average shopper encounters 20-30,000 products per shopping trip, distinctive packaging design becomes your most critical marketing asset at the moment of decision.

What are the key elements of successful packaging design?

Successful packaging design balances distinctive brand expression with category recognition, creating what we call “familiar surprise”—enough category cues to establish relevance while introducing unexpected elements that capture attention. The essential components include: strategic hierarchy that guides eye movement to key information, distinctive brand assets that create recognition from a distance, compelling benefit communication that answers “why buy?”, material choices that reinforce positioning, structural design that enhances functionality, and thoughtful consideration of the complete customer journey from purchase through usage and potential reuse or disposal. The most effective packaging designs achieve multiple objectives simultaneously: they protect products, communicate information, create desire, reinforce brand identity, enhance user experience, and increasingly, demonstrate environmental responsibility—all while maintaining production feasibility and cost efficiency.

How is sustainable packaging changing the design landscape?

Sustainability has transformed from a niche consideration to a central packaging design imperative, driven by consumer expectations, regulatory pressures, and corporate commitments. Effective sustainable packaging design approaches balance environmental impact reduction with maintained functionality and brand expression. This involves material selection innovations (recycled content incorporation, biodegradable alternatives, mono-material constructions), structural design evolution (light-weighting, transportation efficiency, improved product protection), and clear communication about sustainability credentials without greenwashing. 

Leading brands are moving beyond incremental improvements to reimagine their packaging systems entirely, exploring reusable containers, concentrated product formats, packaging-free alternatives, and closed-loop material flows. The most successful sustainable packaging designs recognize that environmental responsibility must coexist with shelf impact, brand recognition, and consumer convenience to drive mainstream adoption and meaningful impact.

How do we balance creativity with regulatory requirements in packaging design?

Navigating regulatory requirements while maintaining creative impact requires systematic approaches integrated throughout the packaging design process. Start by establishing comprehensive compliance requirements early—identifying mandatory elements, prohibited claims, and industry-specific regulations across all markets where your consumer packaged goods will appear. Designate “non-negotiable zones” for required information while preserving “creative territories” where distinctive brand expression can flourish. Involve regulatory experts proactively during concept development rather than retrospectively during approval phases. Consider developing modular design systems that maintain consistent brand presentation while accommodating varying information requirements across different markets. 

The most successful brands view regulatory requirements as creative parameters rather than limitations, finding opportunities for distinctive expression through typography, color, composition, and material choices while ensuring all necessary information remains clear and compliant. For emerging brands, a packaging design agency can be an invaluable asset in crafting compliant packaging.

How does packaging design differ across retail environments?

Different retail contexts create fundamentally different visibility conditions that successful packaging design must address. In traditional retail, packaging must create impact from multiple distances and angles—recognizable from aisle approaches while delivering detailed information during close examination. In e-commerce, thumbnail photography becomes your first impression, requiring designs with strong digital presence and consideration of the “unboxing moment” as a crucial brand experience. In specialty retail, packaging design often receives longer consideration time, allowing for more nuanced storytelling and detail appreciation. 

For brands spanning multiple channels, the challenge becomes creating packaging systems with enough flexibility to succeed across diverse environments while maintaining consistent brand recognition. This increasingly requires thinking beyond the primary package to consider the complete packaging system, including secondary packaging, shipping materials, and digital presentation across platforms. A great example is our packaging redesign for Chameleon Coffee.

Is the packaging design process similar to brand design?

Branding and packaging are inarguably linked, and the design process for a packaging design project mirrors much of the design process used in brand design. With existing product brands that have an established brand and visual identity— logo design, brand colors, and supporting elements— packaging design is an exercise in growing and strengthening that design system. New design elements may be added to the system, and each should reinforce your brand story, highlight your value proposition, and speak to your target audience. Line extensions and seasonal offerings can be a great way to keep customers engaged and strengthen your brand. To learn more, check out the cast studies below.

How do I choose a packaging design agency?

Choosing the perfect packaging design agency can often be a stressful and confusing process, and finding the particular type of agency that fits your goals can be a challenge. Selecting the right creative agency is crucial for the success of your business. No pressure, right? Here are some aspects to consider in finding the right packaging design firm, culled from our agency’s insights gained over twenty years of expertise in the branding industry.