It gets harder to look different every year as dozens of new brands show up and inundate markets with thousands of packages. They all invest time and effort to appear in the most captivating, organic, and premium manner. It’s okay to worry about competition, but what sets you apart is your custom stand-up pouch packaging design.
Stand-up pouches make carrying and opening easy while keeping your contents fresh for an extended period. Their customizable structure, barrier properties, and practical features make them a great packaging option to adopt for foods, cannabis extracts, mushroom-infused gummies, and other products.
Structural design options: Which one fits your product best?
Before moving on to the visual and trendy aspects of stand up pouch packaging design, let’s dissect the types of bottoms you can go for. The structural design of your packages can affect usability, weight, and shelf stability, with the best options being:
- Doyen (also called round-bottom gusset or Doypack)
- K-Seal bottom
- Plow bottom
The Doyen style is the most versatile and popular choice among brand creators. Its U-shape seal allows the package to anchor itself on the shelf with maximum visibility. You can use it for packing snacks, cannabis edibles, or powdery products.
Meanwhile, the K-Seal bottom can be likened to a crescent coin and adapted to maintain a product range of 1 to 5 pounds in weight. The Plow style may be a greater fit to package heavy products weighing more than 5 pounds.
The good news is that each of these styles allows for flexibility in fine-tuning your designs to have a distinct appearance.
Advantages of stand-up pouches
These flexible packages are typically multi-layered and combine polymer and barrier materials. The outer layer is the best area for bespoke designs. It should be scratch-resistant to ensure that your pouch maintains a presentable appearance even after transportation. The barrier layer prevents your goods from going stale by repelling moisture and oxygen.
By adopting a stand-up pouch, you have many customizable packaging elements:
- Visible window
- Resealable zippers
- Convenient spouts
- Textures
Additionally, stand-up pouches are lightweight, occupy less space due to their vertical structure, and won’t blow your budget with exorbitant shipping or storage costs.
What makes a great custom stand-up pouch packaging design?
Poor stand-up pouch packaging design starts with the words, “Let’s just make something we can use to sell our products.” The great one starts with the question, “What am I selling and who needs it?”
If you’re designing a pouch for premium cannabis gummies, your concept should be mature, modern, and explicit. If you’re selling CBD drops to customers aged 50+, keep your style calm and easy to comprehend.
This just goes to show you can’t apply fixed rules for your pouch design. You must know your audience first. So, before creating your superb layout, answer these questions:
- What exactly am I selling?
- Who is it for?
- What do people want to see when purchasing my product?
No amount of good design skills will be enough to turn a stand-up pouch into a customer magnet if you don’t know your customer.
If your brand has a well-defined visual identity, including typography, color schemes, and a logo, half the work is already done. Your stand-up pouch packaging design should smoothly extend this identity. Fonts, colors, and a unified graphic style should remain unchanged at the packaging level to ensure brand recognition and message clarity.
The takeaway is that everything you put into your brand should be reflected in your custom pouches.
What’s trending in custom packaging design for stand-up pouches?
Whatever you do for your pouch design should be noticeable and conversion-driving. Here are the trends that can boost your chances of achieving this.
Eco-friendly solutions
Eco-friendly brands are more likely to clinch a sale, so why not integrate this into your stand-up pouches? Cornstarch or algae packages can naturally break down after use and have satisfactory properties for protecting the quality and freshness of your product.
Eco-friendliness may also involve using fewer pouch layers and limiting coatings and decorative elements. Besides, you can solidify your green status with environmentally friendly adhesives.
Neo-retro design
Here’s how you make your shelf presence felt in no time, whether your target audience is Generation Z or Millennial shoppers. Neo-retro nostalgia is among the brightest trends, drawing inspiration from the aesthetic of the 1990s and early 2000s. To follow it, you can enhance your pouches with:
- Fierce neon colors
- Pixel elements
- Grunge textures
- Holography
- References to iconic video games
This trend works best for pouches for mushrooms and is associated with leisure, individuality, and a sense of lightness.
Personalization and limited editions
Personalization and limited editions provide consumers with a sense of uniqueness and involvement. You can capitalize on this trend by reflecting the culture or visual elements of a specific US state, as well as through collaborations with artists and illustrators.
Personalized features, like scratch-off panels and customer-segmented labels, are perfect for attracting attention, creating an emotional connection with buyers, and stimulating repeat purchases. For your brand, it’s an opportunity to be closer to consumers and, at the same time, stand out from the standard solutions used by your competitors.
Minimalism
The fewer design elements, the more powerful the impact. Simple fonts, monochrome or muted palettes, and the laconic arrangement of on-pouch elements can generate the feeling of trust, increased value, and quality. For cannabis products, minimalism is especially relevant, as it goes well with the images of naturalness and responsible consumption.
Minimalist pouch designs can also serve a practical purpose when paired with transparent windows. In some US states, transparent cannabis packaging is still not allowed. However, a partial window in an opaque pouch may be your acceptable compromise.
Making it real
To distinguish your products, surprise buyers with pouches featuring spouts, side gussets, unique visuals, or other custom elements. At MYLARMEN, we can implement them for you after determining which style works best for your product and budget.
We specialize in stand-up pouches and packaging design that comply with US law requirements and adapt to the specific legal regulations of individual states. Want to switch from rigid to flexible packages? Contact us to see some impressive prototypes.