SmashBrand - A Brand Strategy & Packaging Design Agency

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SmashBrand - A Brand Strategy & Packaging Design Agency Package design that’s proven to perform. We design, test, and optimize your product so you can be su

We're a brand experience and packaging design firm, founded by partners who have owned successful retail brands. Purposefully selective, we work with brands that want to stand out and also stand for something.

10/15/2026

Snoopy or Harry Potter? SmashBrand President Christy Lebor finds the Halloween LTO wars on a main-aisle display at Walmart and asks two shoppers to pick a side.

Her take: limited time offers tied to a seasonal moment earn incremental placement and incremental purchase, with little cannibalization of the core line. She would not normally buy this item. Here she is talking about it.

Which one would you buy? Tell us in the comments.

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10/15/2026

Packaging works like meeting someone at a party. First you catch their eye. Then you earn the conversation.

On shelf, shoppers process fast and mostly on autopilot. Big, simple ideas win the first second. Your value proposition only gets read after you've earned attention.

10/08/2026

Cheers to four years with Jessica, our Head of Operations! Jessica started as a Project Manager and now runs the systems that keep every client project moving from kickoff to final files. She has a way of making hard weeks feel lighter, and every meeting is better with her in it. Her energy sets the tone for our whole team. Thanks for four great years, Jess!

10/08/2026

Why do battery packs confuse shoppers? Christy Lebor, President of SmashBrand, walks the battery aisle and breaks down how Duracell and Energizer show up at shelf.

Energizer runs a red Max pack with a pink bunny, a green Recharge pack, and a pink bunny pack that also says Recharge. Christy asks what separates them and finds no clear answer. The graphics vary so much from pack to pack that the line is hard to shop, and shoppers are left to decode the sub-brands on their own.

Duracell is easier because every pack reads as one brand. The problem starts inside the line. Powerboost and Optimum sit side by side with no obvious signal of which tier is premium. The copy on one pack promises extra life and extra power without saying what that means, the fine print is too small to read, and a newer pack now leads with a different claim. It looks like a packaging change in progress, and the value tiers still need work.

The takeaway for any brand with a larger portfolio is that a clean pack helps, and shoppers still need to see your good, better, best at a glance. When a pack takes effort to understand, many shoppers will default to the brand that looks simplest.

Innovations die on shelf for one reason. Somebody moved forward without answering one of six questions.1️⃣ What is it? T...
09/30/2026

Innovations die on shelf for one reason. Somebody moved forward without answering one of six questions.

1️⃣ What is it? Take the largest frame your product can credibly occupy.
2️⃣ Why is it better? Consumers absorb one claim, maybe two. Pick the one that carries the product and prove it.
3️⃣ Does the brand belong here? Equity travels in some directions and not others.
4️⃣ What is the pricing relative to others? Every dollar of distance from the national brand costs volume.
5️⃣ What is the business side? Margin, trade spend, cannibalization, and forecast volume sink launches that tested well.
6️⃣ How hard is it to win this category? Read concentration, private label share, deal volume, and the cost to get noticed.

📊 None of these require a lab or a year. They require someone in the room asking them while the answer can still change the product.

📨 This edition of NICE PACKAGE works through each checkpoint with shelf examples. Swipe through.

09/24/2026

Mauna Loa segments its entire macadamia nut portfolio around one variable: whether the nut is chocolate-covered or not. Non-enrobed products get water-based island imagery. Enrobed (chocolate) products get land and mountain scenes. The Kona coffee SKU breaks the pattern on purpose, swapping in coffee fields as its own landscape.

A color strip marks the specific flavor within each imagery category, so shoppers scanning fast get two signals at once: format (land or water) and flavor (the strip). Most shoppers won't consciously register the system. That's the point. It's shelf navigation built into the art, not a callout or an icon.

This is a shelf teardown from the Shopping With Christy series, where we study CPG packaging and brand architecture decisions in the wild.

09/14/2026

Four years ago Glady Rosales joined us to lead consumer testing, and today she's our Consumer Testing and Research Manager, turning consumer truth into better creative decisions across dozens of client engagements. Glady designs the test, runs the field, reads the data, and brings the answer back to the room.

Her rigor, curiosity, and steady work ethic have made PREformance testing something our clients rely on and our team builds around.

Cheers to Glady for 4 incredible years, and to even more breakthroughs ahead! 🥂

09/10/2026

Christy saw the tray before she saw the pack. That is the whole lesson.

A limited-edition Mr. Clean All Purpose Spiced Harvest stopped Christy
Lebor mid-aisle at Costco. Not the principal display panel. The club
tray: orange, a winking Mr. Clean in a winter beanie, and "spice up
your life" on the side panel.

What Christy flagged as the ex*****on win:

1. She read the side panel from around the corner, before the PDP was
legible
2. The seasonal cue registered first, then the brand cue confirmed the
category
3. The naming choice is "Spiced Harvest," not "pumpkin spice"
4. The turn holds the base claim intact: cuts through 100% dirt,
grease and grime

The takeaway for club channel: when you buy a club pack, you are
buying the tray. Brief it like packaging, not like a shipper.

Which club pack should Christy tear down next? Comment it.

09/10/2026

Ask an AI tool to make pizza packaging imagery "taste delicious" and it will generate something. It always does. Mike Keplinger, Chief Innovation Officer at SmashBrand, breaks down why that output looks nothing like a concept built from actual consumer research, like knowing cheese and crust texture are the two visual cues that establish taste in the pizza category.

Feed AI a detailed brief grounded in that kind of insight, and the concepts it generates become actionable. They resonate and deliver on the decision drivers that drive choice over competitors. Feed it a vague prompt, and you get imagery, not a strategy.

Watch the full episode on Startup to Scale with Jordan Buckner: https://www.foodbevy.com/274-can-ai-create-packaging-that-actually-sells/

09/04/2026

Four years ago, Aileen joined SmashBrand, and she's been the connective tissue of our creative process ever since. As Creative Project Coordinator, Aileen guides projects from kickoff through design rounds, consumer testing, and final production files, keeping dozens of client engagements moving at once.

Her precision and dedication to getting the details right have made our process stronger and our delivery sharper for every client we serve.

Here's to 4 incredible years with Aileen, and to many more! 🥂

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