Case Study — Product & Brand Design
Primer
Seltzer
End-to-end product design for a health-conscious seltzer brand launch — from visual identity and packaging architecture to seasonal campaign design, motion, and data-informed post-launch iteration.
The Problem
A crowded shelf. A new brand. No room for average.
The health-conscious beverage market is one of the most visually competitive retail environments in consumer goods. Primer Seltzer was entering as a new brand with no shelf equity, no brand recognition, and no design system — going up against established players with years of consumer trust.
The design challenge was multi-layered: build a visual identity from zero, create packaging that communicates health-first positioning in under three seconds on shelf, and do it across 6+ SKUs with enough flexibility for seasonal campaigns — all before launch date.
“In retail, you don’t get a second chance at a first impression. The packaging has to do the selling before anyone reads a word.”
Research
Understanding the consumer before designing for them.
Before any design work began, I immersed myself in the competitive landscape and ran structured research to understand what health-conscious consumers actually respond to on shelf and in digital touchpoints.
Mapped visual strategies across 30+ beverage brands — La Croix, Spindrift, Olipop, Poppi and others. Identified white space: most health brands led with clinical minimalism or bold colour, but few combined warmth with credibility.
Participated in analysis of 20+ focus groups covering flavour preferences, packaging appeal, and purchase decision factors. Key finding: consumers made shelf decisions in under 4 seconds, driven primarily by colour and flavour legibility.
Used SQL and Power BI to analyse customer behavioural data and segment audiences by purchase pattern, flavour preference, and seasonal buying behaviour. Translated segments into design personas that guided packaging and campaign decisions.
Identified mango-flavour demand spikes during summer months through sell-through data. This insight directly informed the seasonal packaging redesign strategy post-launch.
Core Insights
What the research actually said.
Before a consumer reads the flavour name, they’ve already processed colour. Packaging needed a colour system that communicated flavour and health-positioning simultaneously — not one or the other.
Consumers build trust through recognition. 6+ SKUs that look like 6 different brands erode shelf equity. The design system needed strong consistency with just enough variation to differentiate flavours clearly.
Sell-through data showed that peak sales were seasonal, not habitual. Design needed to flex for campaign moments — summer, holiday, launch — without breaking the core brand system.
The analytics team had rich behavioural data that wasn’t reaching the design function. Bridging that gap — translating segmentation data into design briefs and personas — became one of the most impactful things I did in this role.
Design Direction
Warm credibility. Flavour-forward. System-first.
The design direction rejected both the cold clinical aesthetic of legacy seltzer brands and the maximalist chaos of energy drinks. Primer needed to feel approachable, premium, and honest — a brand you’d trust with your health and your fridge.
Built the brand identity from zero: wordmark, colour palette, type system, and illustration language. The system was designed to scale across packaging, digital, print, and motion without losing coherence.
Designed packaging across 6+ SKUs with a modular architecture — shared structural elements (logo placement, flavour band, ingredient callout) with flavour-specific colour and illustration. Every SKU is immediately recognisable as Primer.
Created modular point-of-sale and retail display templates for in-store activations, seasonal campaigns, and e-commerce product pages. Modular system meant marketing could adapt assets without breaking brand consistency.
Designed social media post templates, promotional posters, and brochures that extended the packaging visual language into digital and print touchpoints. Maintained design system discipline across every channel.
Produced motion animations for digital campaigns — bringing the brand to life beyond static assets. Motion direction followed the same warmth-and-credibility principle as the visual identity.
Prototype & Concept Testing
Test before print. Always.
Packaging design has an unforgiving constraint: once it goes to print, changes are expensive. Every design decision went through structured concept testing before production sign-off.
Tested three colour direction options with focus group participants. Core question: which palette communicates ‘healthy’ without feeling clinical? Finding: warm neutrals with saturated flavour accents outperformed both all-white clinical and all-bold options.
Tested how quickly consumers could identify flavour from 3 feet away — simulating shelf distance. Finding: illustration-led flavour cues outperformed text-led cues by a significant margin. Shifted design to lead with illustration.
Presented all 6+ SKUs together to test whether the family read as one brand. Finding: early versions had too much variation in the flavour band placement. Standardised the structural grid, which resolved the inconsistency.
Tested how packaging visual language translated to social media and e-commerce. Finding: packaging detail that worked in print became noise at 1080px. Created separate but consistent digital asset templates.
Technical Decisions
Design decisions are production decisions.
In packaged goods design, technical and creative decisions are inseparable. Every choice has a production implication — print specification, cost, manufacturing constraint, or shelf durability.
Built a component-based system in Figma — shared structures, flavour-specific variables. This made new SKU creation 3× faster and ensured brand consistency without repeating foundational design work for every flavour.
Used CorelDraw alongside Adobe Illustrator for final print-ready files, meeting print vendor specifications for colour profiles, bleed, and die-line accuracy. Design intent survived the print production process.
Bridged the gap between analytics and design by translating customer segmentation data and behavioural insights into visual design briefs and user personas. Data directly informed packaging hierarchy and campaign visual priorities.
Produced animations within brand system constraints — same type, colour, and illustration language as static assets. Motion wasn’t a separate creative direction; it was an extension of the existing system.
Used InDesign for brochures, POS materials, and print campaign assets. Maintained master style sheets tied to the core brand system so any update to the system propagated across all print collateral automatically.
Iterations
Launch was the beginning, not the end.
Post-launch, I used sell-through performance data and customer feedback to drive design iteration. The creative process didn’t stop at launch — it became more precise.
Sell-through data identified mango-flavour demand spikes in summer months. Designed a seasonal campaign packaging variant and supporting social assets that leaned into the peak period. Result: 40%+ sales lift during peak months.
Post-launch shelf audit showed some flavours were underperforming despite strong design. Customer feedback revealed flavour name legibility was the issue, not colour. Increased flavour name size and weight across all SKUs in the next print run.
Social media performance data showed that posts with product-in-context images significantly outperformed flat pack shots. Redesigned the social template system to prioritise lifestyle-context compositions over product isolation.
Iterated on seasonal campaign visuals based on engagement data — A/B tested headline copy positioning, colour temperature, and product placement within frame. Each iteration was informed by the previous campaign’s performance metrics.
Outcomes
6+
SKUs designed & launched
40%+
sales lift — peak season
20+
focus groups synthesised
5
design channels owned
What I Learned
Design systems are a competitive advantage.
Building a modular system from the start — rather than designing each SKU individually — meant every new flavour, campaign, or seasonal variant could be executed faster and more consistently. Systems thinking isn’t overhead; it’s leverage.
Data is a design brief, not a report.
The most impactful work I did wasn’t purely creative — it was translating customer segmentation data and behavioural insights into design briefs and personas. When data and design speak the same language, the output is sharper and faster.
Launch is a hypothesis.
The packaging that launched was not the packaging that performed best. Post-launch iteration — driven by real sell-through data — produced more impactful design than any pre-launch assumption. Ship, measure, and improve.
Multi-channel design discipline is rare and valuable.
Owning the design across packaging, print, social, motion, and POS simultaneously forced a level of system discipline that single-channel work doesn’t. Every decision had to hold across five different contexts — that constraint made the design better.
Designs
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)