It’s incredible how many brands still launch packaging that’s designed to stand out on shelf but that is hard to identify on a phone screen. Or how about package design with lots of complex details that simply get lost online? Things are changing fast in retail channels. And when it comes to physical arena, the club sector especially, there’s a rigid mass volume mindset that often leaves the brand behind—or worse confines the brand to only one aisle and refuses to see the possibility of success in other areas of the store.
How Softlips® Broke the Mold and Had Success Throughout the Store
Every channel has its rules and standards. Club store packaging is all about quantity and delivering value to the consumer. For Softlips, a leading manufacturer of lip balm, the objective was to move their product beyond cough and cold to other aisles in the store. Knowing the mission was to reach a new consumer, new packaging had to be created.
The client had already designed their product’s delivery system from a tube to a five-in-one lip care line in stylish cube containers. The strategy was to offer the line in a selection of flavorings showcased in a colorful 4-pack of cubes that the stores would feel comfortable placing in high-visibility areas. The packager designed a dramatic variety four-pack sleeve inside a clamshell, blister pack. The mission? To create a package that would show off the cubes yet have a dramatic shelf presence of its own.
From receipt of the initial project brief to delivery of packaging to the client’s facility was only three months—an extremely tight schedule for a project of this magnitude. The result is a 3D effect with the cubes “floating” dramatically in their own environment of space and color, clearly visible for the consumer to view four different products in a single package.
The client says it best: ”Our initial concern was whether the packaging would match the beautiful prototype, but we were not disappointed. The final package had the same crisp, saturated colors and eye-catching elements. It was all we had envisioned.”
The win was all about meeting the initial objective: taking a product that had been confined to the cough and cold aisle and broadening its audience in a store environment with rigorous standards.
Great packaging works at its best when all of a brand’s benefits and potential come to life. To give consumers a 360-retail experience, packaging partners need to design an identity that has the flexibility to create desire across all the different channels, and via more than just one aisle in the store. Today there is the opportunity to create desirable, inspirational packaging solutions for an integrated world, whether the impact you seek to make is on shelf, in hand, in mass and specialty or online.
Want a Packaging Partner Who Can Leverage Your Brand Across Retail Channels? Make Sure They Can Answer These Questions
- Are your designers experienced across retail, club, mass, specialty and online?
- What are your channel strategies for packaging?
- What are the budgetary and manufacturing restraints by channel?
- How can you help us meet our pricing objective?
