You have a product, a shelf date, and a designer waiting for a brief. You do not know what flexo is. You do not know FOGRA39 from PSO Uncoated, or what a litho-laminated carton is, or why foil tooling costs the same for fifty units as for fifty thousand. That is fine. Your designer and a printer between them know all of that, and they would rather you did not guess at it.
What you need to know is four things, and the whole specification follows from them. To make it concrete, this guide follows one job all the way through: a folding carton for 250 grams of coffee beans, three variants, on the shelf in March.
Name the container
A folding carton, a label on a jar, a pouch, a bottle, a can, a tube, a mailer box, or a set of several. This one choice decides whether a dieline is needed, whether the artwork wraps around a curve, whether distortion has to be corrected at the shoulder of a tube, and whether a structural supplier should be involved before the design starts. It is the packaging equivalent of choosing the platform for a video, and it removes more questions than any other.
“We need packaging for the new coffee range.”
“A folding carton for 250 g of whole beans. Three variants, same carton, different artwork.”
Say whether a dieline exists
A dieline is the flat shape of the pack before it is folded. Nothing can be designed for a carton or a pouch until it exists. Either you have it, your supplier provides it, or someone has to create it, and "I don't know" is the most common honest answer. Say which. The two answers that mean artwork cannot start yet, "no" and "I don't know", are the single most common cause of a packaging delay. Saying them in the brief is what turns a delay into a plan.
For our carton: the current printer made the existing carton, so a dieline exists. One email to the printer and the designer has it on day one.
“Dimensions to be confirmed.”
“A dieline exists from our current printer, 74 × 74 × 150 mm. We will send it with the brief. The carton must fit the existing shelf tray, so the size cannot change.”
Give the quantity as a range
Under a hundred, a few hundred, a few thousand, tens of thousands. That is enough. From the range a designer knows whether this is digital or offset, whether Pantone spot colours are economic, whether foil or embossing make sense, what the colour profile should be, and how many working days the press needs. You are not being asked to know any of that. You are being asked for a number you already have.
Give the first run and the reorders separately if they differ, because they often change the method.
“Quantity depends on how it sells.”
“First run 5,000 per variant, 15,000 in all. Reorders of around 2,000 per variant after that.”
At 15,000, offset litho. At 2,000 reorders, the designer will check whether digital makes the reprints cheaper.
Give the date the product is on the shelf
Not the date you think the artwork is due. The date the pack is needed in the world. A designer works backwards from it: shipping to the warehouse, print lead time, a legal review if there is a regulatory panel, and the proof round. The gap between the shelf date and the real artwork deadline is routinely six weeks, and people who guess the artwork date guess it late. Give the shelf date and let the subtraction be done for you.
“Artwork needed by mid-February.”
“On the shelf in Meny on 3 March. That is the fixed date; work backwards from it.”
Six weeks of print, delivery and a legal check puts artwork with the printer around 20 January. Mid-February would have been three weeks late.
List the regulatory content
Barcodes, ingredients, nutrition, allergens, recycling marks, net weight, country of origin, batch fields, best-before space, warnings. Tick what applies. A legal panel then gets reserved at the mandatory minimum type size, a legal review gets its ten working days in the schedule, and the question of who supplies the text gets asked while there is still time to answer it. Missing regulatory content is the second most common cause of a packaging reprint, after dielines.
For the coffee carton: ingredients, allergen statement, net weight, best-before space, barcode, recycling mark, country of origin. Somebody has to supply the barcode numbers, and it is worth naming who in the brief.
“Legal text as per usual.”
“Must appear: ingredients, allergens, 250 g net weight, best-before space, EAN barcode, recycling mark, origin. Jonas supplies the barcode numbers by 10 December.”
When you do not know
You may not know the quantity yet, or whether a dieline exists. Write that down as it is: "Quantity not decided, somewhere between 3,000 and 10,000" or "We do not know whether the old printer has a dieline; can you ask them?" A range still tells your designer the print method. An honest "we do not know" about the dieline moves the first task from design to a phone call, which is the right first task. What costs money is a confident number that turns out to be wrong at the proof stage.
The one thing to check before any of this
That your logo exists as vector artwork. A logo that lives only as a JPEG on the website cannot be printed at packaging quality, and this is discovered late almost every time. If you are not sure, ask whoever made the logo for the files before you brief anything.
When you brief packaging with HereBriefly, these four things are four taps, the regulatory list is a set of chips, and the print method, the bleed, the resolution and the real artwork deadline are written into the document from your answers.
Nicolai Højfeldt founded HereBriefly and writes these guides. Everything in them comes from briefs that went wrong on one side of the table or the other, and from the ones that went right.
