“We had 90 days to hit a retail reset with new packaging—no extensions,” recalls Maya, VP of Brand at Luminex, a mid-market beauty label selling across North America. “We needed precision color, a premium unboxing, and a bill of materials that our ops team could actually keep in stock.”
Based on early workshops with **packola**, we built a timeline that started with brand guardrails, not dielines. The creative team wanted a soft-touch feel and a metallic accent for the hero SKUs, but the production team flagged color hold across substrates as the real risk. Here’s where it gets interesting: we moved fast by reducing the number of variables, not by cutting steps.
Fast forward three months: a refreshed eyeshadow line launched on time, retail partners got clean replenishment windows, and DTC fans kept the new boxes on their vanities. The path wasn’t smooth—there were color shifts on recycled boards and a hiccup with carton strength—but the outcomes were solid and repeatable.
Company Overview and History
Luminex started in 2016 out of Vancouver and grew into U.S. specialty retail by leaning on bold pigments and a transparent ingredient story. Their assortment sits in the Beauty & Personal Care aisle, with a growing DTC base. The packaging brief covered a hero eyeshadow palette relaunch and two accessory SKUs, all in Folding Carton. A separate pilot involved a rugged accessory line under a sister label sold online, requiring a corrugated presentation kit with a checker-plate texture for a tool set.
The cosmetics line needed tactility and clean color reproduction—think soft-touch coating and a subtle foil. The industrial kit demanded impact resistance and a graphic pattern that reads tough on camera. That’s why Luminex ran two parallel tracks: a premium carton for custom eyeshadow boxes, and a structured shipper with a printed ‘checker plate’ motif for custom checker plate tool boxes. It sounded messy, but separating design intent from production pathways kept both tracks under control.
On the brand side, the stakes were clear. Retailers expected consistent spine color across multiple hues, and DTC unboxings had to feel giftable without driving up kWh/pack. The team chose Digital Printing for pilots and short-runs, with an Offset Printing path for scale once forecasts stabilized.
Implementation Strategy
The turning point came when the teams aligned on three non-negotiables: G7-calibrated color, FSC-certified paperboard, and a finish stack of soft-touch + selective foil. We locked a die-line within week two, built print-ready files in week three, and ran digital mockups in week four. For cartons, we trialed SBS paperboard versus CCNB; CCNB carried a slight color cast in blues and purples, pushing ΔE above 3 on two shades. SBS brought ΔE under 2 after calibration, so we standardized there for the eyeshadow line.
Here’s a question we heard from the ops lead on week one: “what are custom packaging boxes when you strip out the buzzwords?” Our working answer was simple—a structural spec married to a brand story. In practice, that meant 18–20 pt SBS for palettes, UV-LED Ink for crisp detail, and Soft-Touch Coating followed by Foil Stamping on the logo lockup. For pilots and subscription drops, the team relied on packola boxes produced via Digital Printing, then migrated seasonal winners to Offset for large orders. A promo card with a unique packola coupon code was inserted into DTC orders to track conversion.
Trade-offs were real. Soft-touch can mute colors; we compensated by slightly boosting mid-tone contrast and applying Spot UV to key text. Foil Stamping introduced a second pass and a risk of registration drift, so we widened the foil tolerance by 0.2–0.3 mm. On the industrial pilot, corrugated handled the weight, while the checker-plate pattern was rendered with a matte/gloss interplay to read under harsh warehouse lighting.
Quantitative Results and Metrics
On the cosmetics line, sell-through improved by 8–12% across the first full replenishment cycle at two regional retailers. Color accuracy held within ΔE 1.5–2.0 on priority SKUs. First Pass Yield moved from 82% to roughly 90–93% after we standardized substrates and tightened prepress. Waste dropped in the range of 20–30% on make-ready sheets during the second month as the team codified press recipes. Changeover time trimmed by 10–15 minutes per run when foil dies were grouped by size and position.
Sustainability and logistics saw steady gains: all cartons are FSC mix, and kWh/pack fell by an estimated 5–8% after consolidating finish passes. For DTC, average unboxing ratings in post-purchase surveys rose by 0.4–0.6 points on a 5-point scale. The pilot for the tool kit—those checker-pattern shippers—showed a damages rate below 0.5–0.8% in transit. The promo card tied to the packola coupon code accounted for 6–9% of repeat orders in the first eight weeks. Not perfect data, but enough signal to keep the roadmap intact.
