3 Custom Packaging Design Tips For Pop-up Store Retailers

Most brands have taken advantage of pop-up stores as one of the hottest retail trends with no sign of slowing down. While there’s tons of benefits in opening a pop-up shop – including testing a new product, driving media buzz, and increasing brand awareness – there’s also tons of ways to increase your impact inside the store and make for a truly unforgettable experience for both customers and the press

A pop-store is an opportunity for both new and existing customers to experience your brand in a fully immersive way. They get to interact directly with your product range, meet your staff, and explore a space modeled in your brand’s image. A successful pop-up store is all about the in-store experience. It needs to do something a little out of the ordinary. If your pop-up isn’t a disruptor to the common retail experience, it’s not going to create a buzz around your brand.  One way to ensure a memorable experience: custom packaging.

Custom packaging is cognitively engaging, and remains a novelty in most retail experiences. This means that custom packaging wields a massive influence over brand perception. When you want to grab people’s attention the moment they walk into your pop-up, it’s a fantastic way to stand out from the crowd! Here’s why you should use custom packaging in your pop-up store.

• Custom Packaging is important for brand recognition

It might be that your business already uses custom packaging for your online orders. But it’s important to consider how this applies within the context of a pop-store. Custom packaging will play a different role when the selling channel is a transient one. Undoubtedly, a lot of customers visiting your pop-up store will have shopped with your brand before. But the key purpose is to acquire some new business as well.

The last thing you want is for customers to leave the pop-up shop struggling to remember your brand, or wondering where they can find you once your pop-up residency has finished. While you could print this information on flyers, packaging is far more likely to receive attention. Why? Because packaging is akin to the cover of a book someone has been dying to read – it tells the story of your customer and their eagerly-awaited purchase.

Pro tip: Your design should be cohesive with your brand image (e.g. color and motifs) and should integrate important information that will help drive repeat purchases, such as social media handles and web addresses.

2. Custom packaging allows you to get creative 

Not every pop-up experience is created alike. But there is a place for custom packaging in every kind of operation, whether it’s a general event space, a store-within-a-store, or even a kiosk!

For example, the most common approach in physical retail is to wrap purchases in custom packaging at the point of sale. This is a lovely way to cap off the service experience, and creates that goldmine ‘value-added’ perception in your customer.

But custom packaging can also be a powerful incentive to interact with a product. If you use it to visually merchandise within your pop-up store, this makes your products much more engaging. This is important, as consumers are increasingly gravitating towards ‘experiences’ in their retail habits. When your store (and your products!) are a joy to interact with this drastically increases the odds of a sale, and of your brand sticking in your customers’ mind long term.

Depending on your set-up, you might not have much in the way of shelving or units to merchandise with. Custom boxes with branded tissue paper lining, for example, offer a brilliant display and packaging option in one.

These types of branded ‘set-ups’ also make for engaging social media content and displaying your goods in this way creates a brilliant value proposition to your online audience!

3. Custom packaging is memorable

In general, packaging has a very short shelf life. We throw it away the moment we arrive home and unpack our purchase. This is problematic for your pop-up for several reasons. Not only is this wasteful, it also means the loss of one of your biggest branding materials. It’s a classic case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Once it’s gone, your customer has lost this major cognitive prompt to check out your offerings!

Try providing a branded packaging design from your pop-up store that your customer will want to keep a hold of. Reusable packaging has innate value to your customer, such as giving away branded tote bags free with purchases from your pop-up. It’s an endlessly useful extra, and also helps to keep your brand top-of-mind.

It’s also a great opportunity to get creative and gain some valuable engagement from customers! Eco-friendly company Byron Bay Bath Bombs uses branded cardboard cylinders, which they encourage customers to reuse. To show their commitment, they share the possibilities on social media and encourage customers to trade ideas amongst themselves. Not only is this a more sustainable method of packaging, but also helps to keep their brand name around the house for longer!

If you keep these considerations in mind, this will help you to create a custom packaging design for your pop-up store which gives creates engagement and brand recognition – the keys to a successful pop-up!

Beth Owens is the Content Strategist and resident unboxing expert at noissue. Their premium custom tissue paper is acid-free and FSC-certified as being socially and environmentally responsible in its production. Their low minimum order quantities and quick turnarounds mean that they are suited to help businesses of every size with their pop-up store!