“We sell promises, not just boxes,” says Sofia Mendes, Head of Packaging at BriskMove, a European retailer focused on apartment moves. “On move day, a box either earns trust—or it doesn’t.” The team prototyped artwork and structural tweaks at **upsstore** during the early sprint, looking for a way to bring warmth and clarity to brown kraft without losing their friendly, optimistic brand voice.
It started with a very ordinary search—“where to buy moving boxes for cheap”—and quickly turned into a design brief with emotional weight: make the packaging feel calm under pressure. The constraints were real: small batch sizes, lots of language variants, seasonal demand spikes, and tight city stairwells.
As a packaging designer, I care about touch as much as color. A crisp icon near a hand hold can reduce hesitation. A softer varnish can telegraph care. That’s the lens we used to interview the BriskMove team: a conversation about color, structure, and those human moments when a box meets the bottom of a staircase.
Company Overview and History
BriskMove began in Lisbon in 2013, serving young renters who move often. The brand grew across urban hubs in Europe—Barcelona, Lyon, Rotterdam—where lifts are small and stairwells narrow. Their product portfolio spans corrugated kits, tape, protective wrap, and specialty formats for lamps, plants, and oddly shaped home items. In retail terms, they live squarely at the intersection of Household and Retail, yet their visual language behaves more like a lifestyle brand.
The team built its reputation on approachable design: calm blues, round-ended type, forgiving diagrams that make packing less stressful. During our interview, Sofia admitted the brand’s packaging had drifted. “Over time, we piled on icons and claims. The boxes felt noisier than the homes we were helping.” That tension set the stage for a redesign—less shouting, more reassurance.
One quirky cultural detail shaped the brief: European apartments often have winding staircases. BriskMove’s social channels shared a popular moving boxes down stairs hack—using grip icons and step numbers near hand holds. People loved it. We kept the idea, but refined it into an understated visual guide that didn’t turn the box into a manual.
Quality and Consistency Issues
The original cartons were printed on Corrugated Board with a Kraft Paper liner. Lovely texture, tricky color. Blues shifted toward green, and brand icons looked a bit tired after scuffing. In press checks, ΔE drifted to the 5–7 range across runs. FPY hovered around ~82–86%, largely due to registration at die-cut hand holds and minor color swings on recycled kraft. None of this was catastrophic, but the brand felt it in customer feedback: the boxes looked less friendly in certain batches.
Another practical issue: specialty formats like lamp boxes for moving needed clearer structural cues. The original artwork didn’t visually differentiate fragile zones from grip zones. “We were depending on copy when we should have been using shape, contrast, and texture,” Sofia told me. That’s a classic design trap—words doing the heavy lifting when a simple icon or tactile cue would do better.
Solution Design and Configuration
We shifted short-run and seasonal cartons to Digital Printing for cleaner control on multi-language versions. On kraft, Water-based Ink kept the feel authentic, while UV Ink on labelstock delivered crisp icons for instruction zones. Structure-wise, we tightened die-lines around hand holds to reduce edge scuffing, added a subtle Varnishing pass on the icon set, and kept the panel fields open—more whitespace, less noise. The print setup tracked Fogra PSD targets, with press-side checks to keep ΔE in the 2–3 band for core brand blues.
Here’s where it gets interesting: prototyping needed to be quick and close to store teams. The company chose upsstore’s upsstore printing for agile mockups, QR test labels, and overnight sample cartoons. “We literally searched upsstore near me while on a store walkthrough,” recalls Sofia. “Being able to A/B test icon size and a soft-touch look in real time changed the way we made decisions.” It wasn’t a silver bullet—kraft still nudges hue—but it tightened feedback loops.
We also rethought information hierarchy: large grip icons near die-cut handles, small step markers along a diagonal path, and a calmer brand panel—no shouting, no clutter. Production-wise, Die-Cutting tolerances were logged per lot, and we documented press recipes for kraft vs CCNB liner variants. The team set practical windows rather than absolutes: keep FPY above ~92%, maintain ΔE under 3 for blues, average Changeover Time ~15–17 minutes on short runs. Not perfect on day one, but grounded and repeatable.
Quantitative Results and Metrics
Fast forward six months: ΔE for brand blues typically sits in the 2–3 range on kraft, with outliers addressed via quick recalibration. FPY moved from ~86% to ~93%. Output per shift rose by about 15–18%, thanks to tighter die-lines and clearer file prep. Changeover Time now averages ~15–17 minutes (down from ~22–24), which matters in seasonal and short-run workflows. On the customer side, breakage incidents for fragile formats like lamp cartons dropped—from roughly 6 per 100 shipments to about 2–3 per 100.
Price architecture was a quiet win too. That early “where to buy moving boxes for cheap” question shaped a tiered design system: core cartons held the friendly blue and essential grip cues; premium kits added a soft-touch feel on the icon panel. It kept choices clear without turning the shelf into a shouting match. And yes, we still run quick proof pulls at **upsstore** locations before large seasonal changes; the proximity keeps the brand nimble when city living throws its usual surprises.
