Our favorite Special Holiday Packaging from 2020
With the holidays very much upon us we wanted to take a look at some of our favorite limited time holiday packaging designs for this year. Creating unique, limited time packaging for the holidays gives your customers an opportunity to give your products as gifts as well as makes the products feel extra special and stand out from your everyday look and feel.
As you will see below, some brands deviate far from their everyday looks while others choose to incorporate something as simple as swapping out a label design. Whatever you decide is appropriate for your holiday strategy, rest assured if you take the extra step and create unique packaging for this time of year it will help garner attention and drive sales for customers hungry for gift giving ideas.
Image courtesy of Whitley’s Peanut Factory
First up is our very own design for our client Whitley’s Peanuts. As part of our complete redesign of Whitley’s packaging, we wanted to create something for their holiday packaging that would be familiar to their customers since there was going to be so much change design-wise across the brand this year. We landed on a snowy background featuring rolling hills, deer and a cozy little cabin with the fire burning.
Our inspiration for the typography came from vintage typefaces and designs that utilized ornate scrolls and decoration. The holly details give you all the holiday feels and if you zoom out, the frame shape looks like a vintage ornament.
Whitely’s customers LOVE giving their products out as gifts so we wanted to create something that feels special, familiar and nice enough that you don’t have to wrap it! We think the design checks all those boxes, all the while feeling fresh and new.
2. Native
We spotted this line up doing our 100th Target run this season: Native’s Holiday Scents. We appreciate Native’s everyday design aesthetic – clean, simple, bold. Definitely a look that sets them apart from the swooshy flowy style often associated with body care.
For their limited edition holiday design they replaced their usually stark white background with three unique and festive patterns. Each one evokes the feeling of the flavor: stripes for Peppermint, star anise inspired for Vanilla Chai and a fun icing-design inspired for Sugar Cookie.
We love how these special designs fit into the overall brand and family of products, but still feel special and stand out.
Image courtesy of Anchor Brewing
An annual tradition around our house is picking up a few six packs of Anchor Steam’s Christmas Ale, or as I like to call it “Christmas in a bottle”. From the design to the special blend of flavors, the brew evokes a feeling of chilly nights by the fire and Bing Crosby crooning White Christmas.
The design differs from their everyday by shifting the brewery name to the bottom of the label allowing the main message “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” to take center stage. The label’s limited color palette of earthy green and red strays from the normally colorful label design of their everyday line up as well. The final custom touch is the unique annual evergreen illustration featured prominently on the label. This year the drawing is of The Three Graces; three iconic towering sequoias from the Mariposa Grove in California’s Yosemite National Park. The brewery says they represent radiance, joy, and flowering – all things we can use after a year like 2020.
Image courtesy of Atlas Branding
Next up is a design from our friends at Atlas Branding for Poppy Handcrafted Popcorn. Every year they knock it out of the park with their holiday designs for Poppy – and this year is no different.
We love the vintage inspired illustrations for each flavor. They strike a perfect balance of harkening back to the design sensibilities of the 50’s and 60’s while also looking decidedly modern and contemporary.
And if you look closely you’ll notice the illustrations are repeated on each flavor – however they’ve swapped colors so creatively they feel unique to each flavor. You don’t even have to wrap these little canisters up, just pop them under the tree and let the design do the talking.
Last up is another design we created for our clients and friends at Virgin Islands Coffee Roasters. For their first holiday blend they wanted something that felt cohesive with their existing aesthetic yet with a holiday twist.
We created a special holiday label which fits within their existing packaging architecture, swapping out the everyday white in their label(see our case study here) with a festive deep green. Where there is usually a tropical foliage illustration behind the coffee name, we chose a pine cone.
By making these strategic and effective holiday upgrades, Virgin Islands Coffee Roasters are able to keep printing costs low and avoid impacting their production workflow. Proof that you don’t have undergo a large scale redesign to give your customers a special look and feel for the season.
Holiday labels can be complex and elaborate or simple and minimal, but they all have one common thread – they make your products feel special and giftable. Whether you’re giving a festive facelift to a best selling product or highlighting a special seasonal SKU, holiday labels create buzz and drive sales. Nothing creates a sense of urgency with customers like a special limited edition release!
My first stop in Brooklyn was with Steven Jewett, bookkeeper(among many other things) for 
After wandering around like a legit tourist I made my way to 
I wandered farther down into Brooklyn and found 
The rest of the time in the city was spent attending the conference (see Part 2) and taking short little trips on foot – here’s a few of my favorites: