Second installment of From the Studio, our series where we take a real brief that's come across our desks and open it up to take a closer look at what the client asked for, what was really going on underneath it, and how we solved for the underlying issue. Details are changed or generalized to protect the client, but the problem and the thinking are real.

This one wasn't about thinking through a single package, it was about thinking through packaging for an entire line of products.

The ask

A wellness brand came to us with a portfolio, not a product. Over several years of adding SKUs, they'd ended up with more than 15 different packaging formats across their line. Looking closer, we noticed that they had different substrates, different finishes, different colors, and more. Nothing was technically wrong with any single format. The problem only showed up when you looked at the whole shelf at once.

What's actually driving the ask

This kind of sprawl is almost never a decision, but rather an accumulation from various siloed decisions. Each new SKU gets its own packaging call, made for good reasons in the moment: a new claim needed a different seal, a new price point needed a different finish or substrate, and so on. None of those individual calls feels like the problem. But three or four years in, the brand is carrying 15+ packaging component SKUs instead of a handful, ordering in smaller minimums against each one, and sometimes ending up on shelf as fifteen loosely related products instead of one cohesive brand.

That last part mattered a lot here, because the client was in the middle of shifting from a mostly DTC business to a real retail push. DTC hides a lot of packaging inconsistency — a customer sees one product at a time on a screen and in their home. Retail doesn't. On a shelf, the whole line sits next to itself, and it also sits next to competitors who do look like one cohesive system. It's a dynamic we've watched play out publicly with more than one supplement brand making the same DTC-to-retail move: a visibly more unified, premium shelf presence shows up as part of the pitch, not just an operational nicety.

What we did

We audited the full SKU line and consolidated 15+ distinct packaging formats down to 4 core formats that could flex across the entire portfolio. We suggested the same substrate, same structural format, same finish logic, with a product-line differentiation handled through label design and color coding instead of one-off tooling and materials per SKU.

The impact showed up in three places:

• Inventory complexity dropped. Fewer components to forecast, order, and warehouse, and meaningfully better per-unit pricing from suppliers once volume consolidated into 4 formats instead of 15+.

• Brand recognition improved. The line reads as one brand at a glance now, on shelf or online, instead of requiring a logo check to confirm two products are related.

• The whole portfolio premiumized. Four well-executed, consistent formats read as more considered, and more premium, than fifteen slightly-different ones, even when the underlying cost per unit went down.

The bigger takeaway

Packaging sprawl is a symptom of growth, not carelessness, which is exactly why it's easy to miss. Nobody signs off on "let's end up with fifteen formats"; it just happens one reasonable SKU decision at a time. But format consolidation is one of the highest-leverage, least glamorous moves a maturing brand can make, and it matters most right before or during a retail push, when the whole line is finally being judged side by side instead of one product at a time.