01Packaging is a commercial decision first.
Packaging redesigns usually begin with a feeling. The range looks dated next to a new competitor, a retailer has made a comment, or the founder has simply grown tired of the box. Those are reasonable triggers, but none of them is a brief. A designer handed a feeling will produce a better looking pack, and a better looking pack is not the same thing as a pack that sells more, costs less to produce or carries the brand into a new channel.
The redesign is worth doing well because packaging is one of the few brand touchpoints that every single customer handles. It sits on the shelf beside the competition, it appears as a thumbnail in an online store, and it arrives at home where it is opened, kept or thrown away. Each of those moments asks something different of the pack. The brief is where the business decides which of those moments matter most and what the pack has to achieve in each.
Short answer: settle the commercial job of the pack before anyone talks about colour, and the creative work will have something solid to answer.
02Decide what the pack has to do, and where.
Start by naming where the product is actually bought. A can in a bottle shop fridge, a jar on a supermarket shelf, a gift box ordered online and a skincare bottle sold through social media all have different jobs. On a crowded shelf the pack has a few seconds and a few metres to be noticed. Online it may be a small square image beside a price, so detail that works in the hand disappears entirely. At home it becomes part of the product experience, and for gifts it may be the very first thing the recipient sees.
Write down the channels in order of importance and note what the pack has to win in each: attention, recognition, explanation or delight. Most packs cannot do all four equally, and being honest about the priority is what allows a designer to make bold choices.
When we worked with Golden Hills Brewery, the brief was specific about where the cans had to perform: they needed to stand out on the fridge shelf. That single decision shaped the solution, a minimal and modern design with a distinct colour for each can, so every beer is easy to find while the range still reads as one bright collection.
03Agree the information hierarchy.
Every pack carries more information than anyone will read. Brand name, product name, variant, key benefit, ingredients, size, regulatory panels, barcodes, claims and certifications all compete for the same few square centimetres. If the brief does not rank them, the designer will, and their ranking may not match how your customers actually choose.
The useful question is what a shopper needs to understand in the first three seconds, the next ten and only if they pick the pack up. Usually that means the brand and the product type first, the variant or benefit second, and the detail last. Agree that order in the brief, together with anything that must appear by law or by retailer requirement, so it is designed in from the start rather than squeezed in at artwork stage.
For Sergii Skincare, the hierarchy was a strategic choice. Each label highlights the three key ingredients in the product, because the brand promise rests on proven ingredients rather than miracle claims. The pack tells the customer what they need to know, in the order they need to know it.
A packaging brief that asks for something more premium is a mood. A brief that says what the shopper must understand in three seconds is a job.
04Know what to keep before you change anything.
Long-standing customers find products by habit, and habit is usually triggered by one or two cues: a colour, a shape, a symbol or the position of the logo. Change those without thinking and loyal buyers walk straight past the new pack. Keep everything and the redesign achieves very little. The brief should list the existing cues and say which are non-negotiable, which can evolve and which can go.
If you are not sure which cues matter, find out before the brief is written. Ask customers how they find the product, look at reviews and photographs that customers post, and listen to the sales team and retailers. The answer is often surprising.
Riff Raff is a good example of keeping the right thing. The brand had outgrown a plain black and white box, so almost everything changed, but the crown element from the existing logo carried through into the new identity. The packaging was then planned surface by surface, from a customisable gifting panel to a character biography to a small note under the toy, with a Collector’s Edition box with gold foil for limited release characters.
05Settle the range, the production and the budget realities.
A single hero pack is easy to brief. A range is where redesigns get complicated, and it deserves its own section of the brief. List every product, size and variant the system has to cover now and in the next two or three years. Decide how variants will be told apart, by colour, by illustration, by a naming system or by a combination, and which elements stay fixed across the whole family. Our earlier piece on why packaging is the hardest working brand touchpoint covers why designing the range rather than one hero pack matters so much.
Then be clear about what production allows. Existing pack formats and dielines, print process, number of colours, substrate, finishes such as foil or embossing, minimum order quantities, lead times and whether labels are printed in house or by a supplier all shape the design. None of these need to limit ambition, but a designer who discovers them after concepts are approved has to start again, and that is where time and goodwill are lost.
Include the realistic budget range and timing too, even if it feels awkward to share. It lets the agency recommend the right level of change, from a careful refresh to a full redesign, rather than guessing.
06Decide how success will be judged.
The last part of the brief is the one most often left out: how will the business know the redesign worked? Sales lift is the obvious measure, but it takes time and is influenced by many other things. Add earlier signals that can be checked within weeks: retailer acceptance and ranging, shelf presence, online conversion on product pages, customer feedback, photographs customers share, and whether the sales team find the new range easier to present. Agree the measures before launch so the conversation afterwards is about evidence rather than taste.
The same thinking applies once the packs are in market. Packaging works best when it is planned alongside the shelf talkers, social content and campaign creative that launch it, so the redesign arrives as one coordinated story. That is why Bellman treats packaging design and campaign creative as one connected piece of work rather than two separate briefs.
Finally, decide who signs off and when. A packaging project with five approvers and no clear final say will drift towards the safest option. Name the decision maker in the brief, and agree in advance how retailer, regulatory and production checks fit into the timeline.
Questions we hear.
How long should a packaging redesign brief be?
Two to four pages is usually enough. It should cover the channels and the job of the pack, the information hierarchy, the cues to keep, the range and variants, production constraints, budget and timing, how success will be measured and who approves the work.
Should we redesign the whole range at once?
Not always. Designing the system for the whole range at once is wise, because it prevents the first pack from creating rules the rest cannot follow. Rolling the packs out in stages, as stock runs down, is often the more practical way to launch it.
How do we avoid losing loyal customers with a new pack?
Identify the cues customers use to find the product, keep or evolve those deliberately, and tell customers and retailers that the product is the same before the new pack appears. Most lost sales after a redesign come from changing the one cue people relied on.
Do we need new photography or illustration for the packs?
It depends on the job the pack has to do. If the product needs to be recognised quickly online or communicate a variant at a glance, custom photography or illustration is often worth the investment. Decide it in the brief so it is planned and budgeted from the start.
