Print / Packaging
Maybelline — Influencer Box
Overview
A box that gets opened on camera can’t rattle, shift, or jumble. That was the actual brief.
The Brief
WMA came with a request: Maybelline needed a box to hold six tubes of Fit Me! Matte + Poreless foundation, to be mailed to influencers across four markets — Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria and Slovenia.
The catch is in what happens to it: an influencer opens this box in front of a camera. Six loose tubes sliding into a heap on the first shot was not an option. No structural file existed for it — the box had to be engineered, not just decorated. It started from nothing: no dieline, no template, just the product itself.
The Prototype
First move: ask for the six actual tubes. The box was dimensioned from the physical product, not a spec sheet — sized so the tubes sit snug, without enough play to shift in transit or tip over when the lid opens.
Before anything went digital, the layout was drawn, printed flat and glued onto cardboard — a working physical model, built by hand. Then it was loaded with the real tubes and tested: does the fold hold its shape, do the walls warp under the weight, do the tubes stay where they’re placed. Only once it held up in hand did it move to a proper dieline.
The File
The structure that passed the hand test became a 13 × 12 × 5 cm dieline. The visual design came from the client as a master press file — my side of it was adapting the copy for each of the four markets and building four print-ready files on the shared structure. One dieline, four languages: Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Slovenian.
300 boxes in total: Serbia 120, Croatia 80, Bulgaria 80, Slovenia 20.
The Mockup
Before print, the box existed one more time — as a render. Front, back, top, open and closed, so the client signed off on exactly what would land on an influencer’s desk. Print was booked only after that approval.
» Drag to walk around it
Production
Print spec, as sent to press: 4/0 offset on microflute board, matte lamination. Inside, the tubes sit nested in turquoise tissue paper, matched to the teal on the box print. The unboxing holds together down to the last layer because the last layer was specified like the first.
Then the final catch: with boxes shipping to four countries, the client worried the receiving teams wouldn’t fold them correctly — and blame the box. So the run was delivered pre-folded, tissue already inside. Nothing left to assemble, nothing left to get wrong.
Through 2017 the boxes turned up across regional beauty blogs — photographed, unboxed and reviewed by the influencers they were built for, exactly as intended.
