How to Brief a Packaging Designer: A Practical Template for MSME Manufacturers

// Feature: Packaging Design Brief Guide | Vertical: SalesVridhi | Built: January 2026

Most MSME manufacturers who hire a packaging designer make the same mistake: they go in with a product and a budget, but without a brief.

"Make it look good. Something modern. Like what the big brands do." The designer nods. Two weeks later, you receive a beautiful piece of work that is wrong — wrong for your shelf, wrong for your consumer, wrong for your distributor pitch. Now you are paying for a second round of revisions. Or worse, you print 10,000 pouches, put them in the market, and realise three months later why they are not moving.

A clear design brief prevents all of this. It takes two to three hours to write and saves weeks of back-and-forth and lakhs of rupees in incorrect print runs.

This guide gives you a working brief template, explains what to put in each section, and tells you how to review and provide feedback on the designs you receive.

Before You Write the Brief: Four Things to Gather

1. Your Mandatory Elements List

List every element that must appear on the label — both legally required and brand-required. For a food product, this typically includes: FSSAI licence number and logo, brand name, product name and variant, net weight, batch number format, manufacturing date format, best before format, ingredients list, nutritional information table, allergen declaration, manufacturer name and address, MRP, customer care number.

Add any brand-specific elements: certifications (organic, ISO, non-GMO), awards, specific claims, QR codes, social media handles.

This list is non-negotiable. The designer works around these; they do not eliminate them.

2. Your Competitor Audit

Visit the retail formats where you intend to sell. Photograph the five best-selling products in your category at your target price point. This is not for the designer to copy — it is for them to understand the shelf context and deliberately differentiate from it.

3. Your Pack Dimensions and Material Specification

Get exact pack dimensions from your packaging material supplier before the design brief goes out. A 200g stand-up pouch has a completely different label architecture than a 500g glass jar or a 1kg printed box. Designing without dimensions wastes everyone's time.

If you are still deciding on packaging material, shortlist two or three options and get dimensions for all of them. Let the designer know you are finalising the material.

4. Your Budget and Timeline

Packaging design for MSME food brands in India typically costs:

• Freelance designer (good): ₹15,000–₹40,000 per SKU
• Small-to-mid design agency: ₹40,000–₹1,20,000 per SKU, often including brand system
• Premium branding agency: ₹1,50,000+ per SKU

Timeline from brief to print-ready files: 3–6 weeks, including revisions. If you are launching in 10 days, you have already made a planning error that no brief will fix.

The Brief Template

Use this structure for every packaging design engagement.

---

PACKAGING DESIGN BRIEF

Brand: [Brand Name] Product: [Product Name and Variant] Pack Type and Dimensions: [e.g., Stand-up pouch, 200g — 130mm W x 220mm H, 80mm gusset] Date: [Date of brief] Target launch date: [When you need print-ready files]

---

Section 1: Brand Overview

Write 3–4 sentences. Who are you, what do you make, and what is your brand story in plain language? This is the brand narrative you developed (see our post on building brand story). Do not write corporate language. Write as if you are explaining your brand to someone at a trade fair.

Example: "Savera is a cold-pressed mustard oil brand from Bharatpur, Rajasthan. We source sarson (mustard seeds) directly from our farmer partners in Bharatpur district and press them using traditional wooden kachi ghani presses. We are making the original, pungent, alive taste of kachi ghani sarson tel available to consumers across India who have grown up with refined oils and forgotten what real mustard oil tastes like."

---

Section 2: Target Consumer

Describe the specific person who will buy this product. Not "health-conscious consumers aged 25–45." A real person.

Example: "A homemaker in Jaipur, aged 35–50, who cooks North Indian food at home. She has started reading labels in the last two years. She buys from a local kirana or from BigBasket. She is willing to pay 20–30% more for an oil she trusts as 'real' and 'natural.' Her mother used to use kachi ghani tel and she remembers the difference. She does not want clinical or pharmaceutical — she wants something that feels like desi, ghar wala (homemade)."

The more specific the consumer portrait, the better the design decisions.

---

Section 3: Brand Personality

List 5 adjectives that describe your brand's personality. Then list 3 adjectives that explicitly describe what your brand is NOT.

Example:

• IS: Rooted, honest, warm, confident, artisanal
• IS NOT: Corporate, clinical, cheap, flashy, generic

These adjectives are a creative filter. Every design decision — colour, font, illustration style, copy tone — is tested against them.

---

Section 4: Shelf Context and Competitive Landscape

Attach the photographs you took during your competitor audit. State the 2–3 dominant visual patterns in the category (e.g., "Most mustard oils use red and yellow. They look similar to each other on the shelf. Our pack needs to stand out against this.").

State your differentiation direction: "We want to signal premium and traditional — closer to an artisan product than a commodity brand."

---

Section 5: Design Direction

Give reference images. These do not need to be from the same category. Collect 5–8 images (from Behance, Packaging Digest, Pinterest) of packaging that evokes the aesthetic you are looking for. Label each reference: "Like this for the colour palette." "Like this for the illustration style." "Like this for the typography weight."

State explicitly what you do not want: "No photographic product shots on the label. No bright primary colours. No script fonts that look like a greeting card."

---

Section 6: Technical Requirements

• Number of SKUs in this design round: [e.g., 3 — 200g, 500g, 1kg]
• Printing method: [Flexo / Digital / Gravure — ask your packaging supplier]
• Number of print colours: [Full colour / 4-colour process / 2 spot colours]
• Special finishes required: [Matte lamination / Gloss / Spot UV / None]
• File format required for print: [AI / PDF — ask your printer]

---

Section 7: Mandatory Elements

List every element from the mandatory elements list you gathered in the preparation phase. These are non-negotiable. Do not expect the designer to know FSSAI requirements — provide them explicitly.

---

Section 8: Deliverables

Be specific. At minimum: 3 initial concept directions; selected concept taken to 2 rounds of revisions; print-ready files in AI and PDF; separate files for each SKU; layered working files (not just flattened exports).

---

How to Review Designs

When the designer presents initial concepts, your job is not to say "I like this one." Your job is to evaluate each concept against your brief.

Ask yourself:

• Does this communicate our brand personality (the five adjectives)?
• Will this stand out on the specific shelf we photographed?
• Does it speak to the specific consumer we described?
• Are all mandatory elements clearly present?
• Does the front-of-pack hierarchy work — brand name most prominent, then product descriptor, then key claim?

Give structured feedback. "I don't like the blue" is not useful. "The blue reads as pharmaceutical — our brand is IS NOT clinical. Can we explore a warmer tone, something in the amber or terracotta range?" is useful feedback.

Limit revision rounds to two. If you are still dissatisfied after two rounds of structured revisions, the problem is almost always an unclear brief or a mismatched designer — not the design itself.

What Good Packaging Design Costs vs. What Poor Decisions Cost

A strong packaging design system — brand system plus 3 initial SKUs — costs ₹40,000–₹80,000 done properly. This seems significant for an MSME manufacturer.

Now calculate the cost of a wrong print run. A 10,000-unit run of 200g pouches costs roughly ₹30,000–₹60,000 in materials alone. If those packs do not sell because the packaging is wrong — wrong shelf visibility, wrong consumer signal, missing a key piece of information — you have wasted that entire run. Plus the lost opportunity cost of three to six months of a product that could have been growing.

The brief is not bureaucracy. It is risk management. Ek baar sahi brief likhoge, toh designer woh deliver karega jo aapko chahiye. (Write the brief right once, and the designer will deliver what you actually need.)

---

SalesVridhi works with MSME manufacturers across India to build shelf-ready brands and the distribution networks to scale them. If your product is ready to reach more markets, start at salesvridhi.com.