Lindt Advent Calendar Case Study
Behind every beautifully packed product, is a team that has devoted days and nights to bring the best ideas to the table. These teams very often face design challenges, confusion, and overwhelming creative blocks;
Such creative blocks are scary – especially when on the receiving end are revered brands like Lindt!
Lindt Chocolate came to the Mailer Box for the design and production of their annual Advent Calendar.
Now, the beauty of Advent Calendars needs to match the excitement around the time of the year.
The holiday season, a time when the streets are lit with lights and everything around us is filled with the colors of festivity. Whether you are shopping in a mall or walking past a cafe, a sense of warmth and excitement fills the air.
While this makes Advent Calendars so relevant for brands, they come with excruciating pressure for the creative team to conjure something that people would not only cherish and celebrate but would also find new and innovative.
The Mailer Box and its creative team faced similar challenges, but what’s a creative who doesn’t love the thrill that comes with challenges?
The Scope of Project
Lindt & Sprüngli were looking for the following things in their Advent Calendar:
- A design concept for their Advent Calendar Packaging
- A sleeve that envelopes the packaging and safely delivers it to the PR list.
The Goal: Maintaining and Enhancing Brand Integrity
Source: Lindt.co
While Lindt’s team was looking to pleasantly and carefully pack their Advent Calendar, we were taking into consideration the years-long reputation and trademark elements of the brand.
“The Teddy” for example, was not just an element, but an iconic representation of the brand and has relevance and recognition with the customers.
The inside of the calendar, designed by Lindt’s super-talented design team itself, illustrated a colorful snow-adorned landscape with a decorated mix of chocolates.
Each drawer opened up to a new adventure for customers as they would scan the QR codes at the back. Across 24 days these engaging AR adventures form a heartwarming and festive story centered around Lindt’s Teddy.
So how should the packaging complement that by neither overpowering nor letting down the brand? This is where the real challenge began.
The Challenges: Aesthetic to Structural
While our creative team had to work on creating an aesthetically appealing mailer box for the Advent Calendar, our manufacturing team was focused on ensuring the strength and durability of the box itself.
The Advent Calendar was to contain fragile confectionary. Preserving the integrity of those chocolates was the singular most important factor for them. It was up to them to ensure that the packaging materials not only withstand transportation challenges but also help keep the contents of the packaging fresh and secure.
Because at the end of the day, it wouldn’t be good PR to receive broken, squished, or melted chocolates.
In summary, below were the few set of challenges we had to navigate:
- Propose a design concept that compliments the elements of the Advent Calendar
- Test and arrange materials that are durable and high-resistant
- Maintain the integrity of the chocolates by proposing a structure that is both aesthetic and protective of the Calendar.
The Solution
- Choosing the Material
Advent calendars require sturdy packaging that can maintain its structure throughout the 24 days of handling. For the Lindt Advent Calendar 2023, the choice of material was clear from the start—rigid boxes.
Given the importance of durability to protect the delicate and delicious chocolates inside, there was no room for compromise. Rigid boxes are known for their strength and durability and are especially a preferred choice for premium packaging.
Rigid boxes are constructed from high-thickness paperboard, usually ranging from 1.5mm to 3mm. This adds to the box’s sturdiness compared to standard folding cartons. As a result, rigid boxes can maintain their shape even under pressure. For content such as cute teddy-shaped chocolates, rigid boxes ensure that the contents inside are well-protected during transit and throughout the holiday season.
Apart from providing much-needed strength and resilience, rigid boxes also elevate the premium feel of the packaging and consequently, the contents inside.
This is what Lindt’s Advent Calendar also needed so the choice of rigid boxes helped us align Lindt’s limited edition product with protection as well as elegance.
Proposing the Structural Concept
When you look at the concept of the 2023 Advent Calendar, you see how Lindt invited its customers into a world of 24 days of “Adventures before Christmas”. Each drawer contained not only delicious treats but an engaging experience to remember.
Sort of like Narnia, no?
And how does the magical journey of Narnia begin? Through the magical doorway.
Cheesy yes, but that’s exactly how we perceived our packaging to be.
A sturdy magnetic closure rigid box with the Lindt’s emblem in the middle, inviting customers to an uncanny unboxing experience.
To further strengthen the experience, we had an additional perforated sleeve to protect the packaging of the Advent Calendar during transportation and handling. So in total, we had 3 layers of packaging, each unfolding into a more unique, exciting, unboxing experience.
- Designing the Box
Designing the visual of the box was a war against time.
The manufacturing team pressured us to roll out the concept and final designs as early as possible to ensure that the product was sent to production and delivered to the client right on time for Christmas. And as much as our creative team loves to have time for their brainstorming sessions, that luxury just wasn’t on the table.
After just a day of ideation, we decided to go with a subtle illustration that compliments the colorful display of magic on the Advent Calendar.
And to make it festive, we were sure we wanted to leverage gold foil stamping.
We started with some basic line drawings to explore the layout of the illustration around the door. And as it always is, functionally a lot of things were neither practical nor possible.
Eventually, we proposed a minimal option using the key elements of the Advent Calendar; The Teddy & the Chocolates and…
Tada…!!
How absolutely gorgeous! This stood out on the shelves across the USA and Lindt’s team couldn’t be happier.
The insides of the door were utilized to add text and branding elements like the company logo and a brief history of the brand.
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We initially proposed a minimal, no-gold foil option for the inside to avoid overpowering the vibrant Advent Calendar but the client preferred to add a touch of gold to the inside as well and after some deliberation, we saw the value in that.
Read more about how to use goil-foiling for the maximum impact here: https://themailerbox.com/Blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-foil-printing/
Production and Testing
Once the packaging was sent out for printing, our quality department conducted a detailed color-proofing session to ensure that the print perfectly matched the brand’s primary Pantone.
This is a critical step in packaging to avoid any color discrepancies in the digital and physical versions of the box. This is common a risk with bright and warm tones such as Lindt’s. Even a slight variation in CMYK tones and the entire outlook of the print can change. And we could not let that happen by following the print as the foil stamping, which was an additional expense.
The Mailer Box offers CYMK and Pantone matching and never have our customers been disappointed about color differences in printing.
As planned, Lindt’s Advent Calendar print came out just as expected.
It was time to assemble the box and test the structure.
One of the most integral parts of box structure is the correct dimension. The right size ensures that the product packed inside is held firmly, but not too tightly. It is to ensure that it has just the right cushioning to be able to tolerate logistics and handling pressures throughout the supply chain.
As our shipping team was getting the order for Lindt’s advent calendar 2023 ready, we knew that we had achieved the perfect structure and impactful design.
The Result:
It is easy to write and claim that the client was fully satisfied with the delivery. But what makes your packaging service a success is the long-lasting relationship with your client… and to have them come back for more.
So we say nothing more than this:
The mailer box got a repeat order for the same rigid boxes for Lindt’s Advent Calendar set to hit the stores for Christmas 2024
Hold tight for the 2024’s design review!
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Ayesha Khubaib
Ayesha has a diverse experience in areas of marketing and management. Over the years, Ayesha has been involved in the packaging sector in various capacities and now aims to share packaging market insights with her readers
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