Ways to adjust your luxury packaging to meet your business goals

There’s something about the word “luxury” that brings about the expectation that price doesn’t matter. It’s customary to expect that a luxury brand product comes with a higher price point.

However, in business, the bottom line always matters. As well as other aspects of the brand, luxury packaging needs to communicate exclusivity and premium quality, but decision-makers also have their product budgets to keep in mind. And often, spending too much on your packaging could mean missing your optimal consumer price point or making less profit.

Once our designers come up with a creative packaging design a brand loves, they can field requests to figure out ways to get the price per package down. ... without it losing its luxury appeal. It’s their goal to work with brands until they achieve the right balance between a high-value unboxing experience and numbers that make your CFO happy.

There are three main ways they can make changes to improve your premium packaging price point. They can:

1. Make changes in materials.
2. Make changes to the structure.
3. Do a complete redesign.

 

Let’s take a look at those three and the many options within them.

Change the packaging materials and or substrate

Choose a lower weight of board. Paperboard comes in various weights, so choosing a lower weight will reduce costs. Depending on the design and product, brands have some room for choice here depending on the packaging strength they need and the quality they want. For example, rigid boxes are often used for luxury packaging, but the quality of rigid boxes means a higher price point. A designer can often mix the use of rigid board with paperboard substrate, such as SBS (solid bleached sulfate), the highest quality paperboard.

 

 

“We can combine them; for example, maybe there's some rigid work, but then we swap out some pieces for board work and print direct to the board and die cut it,” said Dan Davis, director of packaging design, Smurfit Westrock. “Or we can do the lid in rigid but the base in SBS, so it feels rigid.”

Lessen the use of atypical packaging materials. Some luxury packaging designs work in the use of other materials besides paperboard, such as ribbon, twine, wood or magnets and metal for closures. Using multiple materials increases the price point, so working them out of the design will usually bring down the cost (more on that later).

Take advantage of decorative printing technology. Decorative printing like embossing, textured prints and metallicized prints increases the price point of packaging. So, it’s important to understand the most efficient way to get a high-end print.

 

The more colors that are in the design, the more passes a printer may have to make, increasing the cost and the time it takes to print. However, printers with large, digital printing presses can help lower the cost if their printers have the right capabilities.

“At Smurfit Westrock, we have some of the largest presses in the world,” said Mark Campbell, Smurfit Westrock senior design project manager. “We're able to do many, many colors in one printing pass. If you were going to do a cosmetics box, for example, you wanted to do seven or eight PMS colors, we can do that in one pass, whereas most printers cannot.”

These printers also have the ability to print Foilkote® onto packaging, which eliminates the need of an offline foil stamping process and helps reduce the cost of high-end metallic prints.

Make slight changes to packaging structure.

Make small changes in exterior design. You may not need a complete redesign; you may be able to make slight changes to the design structure in order to lower the price point. Above we mentioned eliminated metal closures. Some brands opt to redesign the package so it can be closed using a tuck instead of a magnetic closure. Some brands may not like that style of closure, which means a complete redesign might be the option they choose to eliminate the metal.

 

Change the internal protective packaging. Many high-end products require protective packaging, and using plastic or foam has been an affordable way for brands to do this. However, we’ve designed interior corrugated, molded fiber or paperboard structures for brands looking for greater sustainability, which can increase the cost.

Looking to make sustainable options more affordable, our designers have found ways to reduce the amount of protective fiber used or eliminate certain pieces that may not be absolutely needed. For example, when designing Golf Pride’s limited-edition packaging honoring the 60th Anniversary of the movie Goldfinger, the brand wanted the packaging of their golf grips to maintain the classy, James-Bond experience but stick to a certain price point for their consumers. Being an iconic franchise, the stakes were high in creating something unique, nostalgic and affordable.

 

After meeting with Smurfit Westrock designers, the team decided to incorporate the famous gold bar and golf scene from the movie; the golf scene would serve as a backdrop and one of the grips would be encased in a box made to look like a gold bar. The team loved the designers’ original concept, but the price per package was a bit more than their target.

To get the price point down, designers eliminated some interior packaging that wasn’t critical to carrying out the concept and then redesigned the gold bar box to have two angled sides instead of four, which provided noticeable cost savings. The anniversary product launch was a success as both golfers and bond fans were pleased by the unboxing experience.

Completely redesign your packaging.

Design with the budget in mind. Sometimes you might not be able to make many changes to your current packaging design to lower the cost and maintain sustainable attributes. In that case, a redesign might be in order. With your price point in mind, designers can go back to the drawing board to design something high-end that eliminates metal closures, reduces the amount of packaging and/or capitalizes on digital printing techniques.

 

Simplify package assembly. Designers will also keep in mind the time and labor it takes to assemble your packaging, because each time a human hand has to touch the packaging or the longer it takes those hands to assemble it, the greater your packaging costs will be.

For example, protective packaging that requires putting three pieces together takes longer to assemble than one piece. Additionally, any manual labor that can’t be automated will add to cost, which means designers will do their best to design packaging that can fully utilize automation for assembly.

“Another reason metal closures are so expensive is that they’re added by hand, and each time a hand picks up a package, that adds to your costs,” said Davis. “So, if there’s anything you can do to get the assembly on a machine, you’re going to be that much better off, because you’re reducing the labor it takes to assemble the packaging.”

Make smart trade-offs to get the most value from your luxury packaging

Our designers agree that everything is a trade-off, and the goal is to make a trade that improves the price point but still achieves the look you want. Taking advantage of the latest technology in automation and high-end digital printing techniques are your greatest assets in helping you maximize the value of your packaging budget. Contact our team to work with designers who have access to the latest capabilities.