Designing desire: The psychology of luxury packaging design

Can a gold-embossed cardboard box make you feel happy, confident, or even powerful? In the hands of a skilled designer, the answer is certainly yes. Understanding the psychology of luxury packaging design helps designers tap into what consumers desire and aspire to and can help us create packaging designs that win hearts and boost sales.

Luxury packaging is a clever marketing strategy that elevates a product’s desirability, making it more saleable to an aspirational customer. 

We all look for psychological signals in product packaging design when we shop. Bright orange and rounded fonts? Design cues that are likely to indicate a cheap and cheerful item. Embossed logo, weighty paper stock, or metallic accents? A luxury brand might adopt these traits in packaging design to signal to the consumer that this is something special—an indulgent or expensive product that’s worth a second look.

Let’s see how to channel the psychology of luxury into your packaging designs. We’ll look at the core elements that contribute to crafting luxury branding and packaging and share tips and templates for creating high-end brand designs.

Brands targeting high-net-worth individuals (HNWI) or aspirational consumers use luxury marketing as a strategy to build an emotional relationship with their intended audience. 

Compared to other types of product marketing, which may emphasize value or convenience, luxury marketing tends to build ideas of exclusivity, exceptional quality, and an aspirational lifestyle into the branding in order to sell the product at a premium price. 

Some luxury marketing focuses on retailing very high-priced products to a smaller group of HNWI, while other luxury marketing aims to raise the premium appeal of a mass-produced product to allow a brand to sell a higher volume at a higher price point. An example of the former might be a private jet (very expensive, very exclusive), while the latter might be luxury cosmetics (moderately expensive compared to other products of the same type, and more widely available).

You’ll also see luxury marketing being used to lift everyday items, such as groceries, into a premium category, using visual cues to enhance the heritage, organic origin, or quality of products.

Luxury packaging boxes, labels, and bags are a small and relatively inexpensive way to tap into the psychology of luxury marketing. The reasons that consumers may respond positively to luxury packaging design include:

At its simplest, luxury packaging design gives consumers pleasure! We all love a little (or large) treat, and beautiful packaging can give us both aesthetic and emotional pleasure, taking us out of our mundane lives and making us feel special.  

Luxury product packaging design sends visual signals to consumers that they will be buying into a particular lifestyle. Luxury products can boost our status in a peer group or wider social group, acting as a visual indicator of how we want to be perceived by others.

Things that are rare have always appealed to us—it’s in our nature to want to feel special and ‘chosen’, and exclusive products that are limited edition, expensive, or scarce are a way of channeling this psychological desire.  

Coined by Leonard Lauder, the heir to Estée Lauder, the ‘lipstick effect’ refers to how consumers often spend more on small luxuries during times of recession or economic hardship. Luxury packaging is a marketing technique that can increase the desirability of a small product, such as cosmetics, chocolate, or alcohol, without significant cost to the manufacturer. 

Creating luxury branding for product packaging design is all about crafting an emotional experience. Sounds far out? What you need to know is that the main thing luxury packaging has to communicate is desire. 

To do this, consider what the consumer desires when encountering your product. Is it status, a particular lifestyle, or perhaps an escape from the everyday? Once you know what kind of emotional experience you want to create with your packaging design, you can select design elements that tap into these desires.

Let’s take an example. Luxury packaging for high-end watches or jewelry might use embossing and heavy, linen-effect card stock to build associations with high fashion and ‘quiet luxury’, allowing the consumer to imagine the type of lifestyle they could have by purchasing the item. Luxury packaging boxes for expensive alcohol, such as champagne or spirits, might feature metallic accents, high-gloss labels, or bold colors to give the impression of a glamorous night out, suggesting to the buyer that they are purchasing an unforgettable evening along with the product. 

Let’s reveal the seven most effective design elements you can apply to luxury packaging. Feel free to mix and match them to create the effect you want. 

Luxury packaging boxes aren’t always traditional boxes! You can surprise and delight customers with an origami-inspired packaging design that unfolds dramatically to reveal the product inside, or why not try designing little ‘extras’—details that bring more to the unboxing experience. 

Keep in mind that unwrapping luxury packaging is popular on social media, with some customers valuing the unboxing experience as much as the product itself. So consider how you can create more theater with your product packaging design, using ribbons, seals, unusual shapes, or pop-up elements. Can the customer reuse the packaging in some way? A beautiful keepsake, such as origami flowers or a year-stamped medal, is also something the recipient can treasure, serving as a handy reminder of the brand. 

The psychology of luxury is intertwined with the psychology of color. While some colors, such as purple and gold, are particularly reminiscent of luxury, indulgence, or status, you can also use rich, jewel-like colors to create the same effect. Deep red, forest green, and midnight blue build associations with establishment and tradition, and they also look fabulous paired with metallic tones of gold, silver, or copper. 

The other color option for luxury packaging design? The quiet luxury trend that’s been dominant in fashion and interior design over the past year continues to beguile consumers with understated minimalism. Think neutral colors of beige, camel, and cream, and designs that whisper luxury rather than shout. Team them with strokable textures like silk, linen, and wool to make packaging that just cries out to be picked up and touched.

Alongside the quiet luxury trend and the consumer penchant for all things beige came the resurgence of serif fonts, and we’re not seeing this trend go anywhere for luxury packaging design. Serif typography brings a sense of tradition to product packaging design, perhaps suggesting an older establishment date for a high-end brand. 

You can also use vintage fonts to channel the luxurious spirit of another time. Art Deco fonts and 1950s-inspired font styles are particularly popular for luxury packaging, as they connect with decades associated with glamor and indulgence.

Why do we associate embossing with luxury? Embossed logos, typography, and patterns bring more texture and depth to an otherwise flat surface, giving the impression that more time and effort has been put into creating the design. We often also associate embossing with old-fashioned wax seals and stamps, which were traditionally a mark of quality and authenticity. 

Bringing embossing into your design will add expense to the print cost, but it’s often well worth doing if you’re creating a luxury design for a high-end brand. You can also bring more texture into your design with different or unexpected materials, such as textiles, wood, or metal. Remember that associations of quality are often communicated through touch as much as sight, so the more tactile you can make your product packaging design, the better.

It’s a luxury packaging cliché that remains evergreen—metallic accents are an instant way to lift your packaging design into luxury territory. Give your luxury packaging the Midas touch with metallic foiling and embossing, or for even more indulgence, make gilding (in which real gold leaf is applied to a surface—reserve this only for the most luxurious packaging!) or eye-catching medallions a part of your design. 

A word of caution—a small touch of metallic detail can elevate luxury packaging boxes, but too much heavy metal can cheapen the effect. So apply this strategy in small doses. 

It seems that luxury packaging design is splitting into two distinct camps—one with minimalist and pared-back designs that communicate luxury through subtle visual cues, and the other with a more-is-more attitude, maximizing pattern and detail.

Whichever camp you feel is more appropriate for your product, it’s important to avoid the traps of either, not allowing subtle designs to fade into the background or maximalist packaging design to stray into brashness.

For maximalist designs, vintage-inspired patterns are a great way to experiment with busy designs while preserving an old-school feel. We’re also seeing luxury packaging dip a toe into much brighter colors, once the reserve of budget brands but finding new popularity as part of Korean-inspired packaging designs. The luxury factor here is communicated through the execution of serious style—think immersive gradients, eye-popping logos, and tactile print finishes that make these ultra-colorful packaging designs stand out. 

Would you turn up to a black tie event in jeans? At the risk of being turned away at the door, probably not. Overly casual design won’t equate to sales when it comes to luxury packaging. It really does pay to make an effort. 

Hand-illustrated labels, artistic box designs, and painterly textures are a way of bringing the high-end exclusivity of the art world into your packaging creations. These artistic designs give a sense of uniqueness and rarity to a design, helping to make limited-edition products feel even more special and desirable.  

In short, yes! But the desirability of the design hinges on the designer’s aesthetic choices. Through the creative use of materials, colors, textures, and print finishes, it’s possible to transform a basic box or bag design into something that connects with consumers on an emotional level. 

How can we design packaging that appeals to luxury-seekers? The best luxury packaging design goes beyond visuals alone and uses thoughtful details that speak to deep-seated desires for pleasure or status. Understand the psychology of luxury and why even those of us who are frequently cash-strapped still buy expensive items, and you’ll be well on your way to creating an irresistible packaging design.

Learn more by exploring our packaging design articles, such as this piece on 80s packaging design. Looking for elements to help you create luxury branding and packaging design? Get started with these elegant packaging design resources from Envato, including fonts, packaging mockups, patterns, and logo templates.