Most merchants choose paper shopping bags for their customers on packaging products because its low cost, elegant, and eco-friendly properties. But how to design a suitable shopping bag is a challenge. Even though a brand with a long history, every time they change the packaging design will also be very prudent, especially about the color.
Why do all successful brands care about shopping bag design? Because it doesn’t only for packaging function but also take the role of promotion. A good shopping bag design will help boost sales and improve your customers’ loyalty.
For example, when we saw a man carrying a big blue tote bag on the street, we know it is from IKEA; the same situation with the Tiffany paper shopping bag. Their excellent designs can make people think about their products at once, although the logo on the bag is not so conspicuous.
Imagine that a potential customer sees many people carrying a shopping bag in the same brand on the street. He may think, is this store publish any awesome news, or holding an attractive activity? Finally, this potential customer will very possible to visit the store. He may start asking for any relevant about this brand if he doesn’t know it before.
For merchants, managing costs well is most important, especially for the just-start business. And the purchase and preparation of shopping bags take up a not small share of the cost.
There are many factors that influence the custom paper shopping bag purchase price, such as the raw material cost, styles, printing technologies, and shipping cost. Suppose other factors are the same, a more simple design is typical with a lower quote and higher productivity. Because it cost less ink and make less mistake on printing.
Every paper shopping bag has a dominant tone, catching people’s eyes and leave an impression. Like we mentioned before about the IKEA blue and Tiffany blue. Most of the dominant tone colors are the same as their brand logo. There are some also like Tiffany blue, a special color that was created independently by the brand.
For the large enterprises, they will hire famous designers to formulate a complete VI(Visual Identity.) But to the small businesses, the cost may be hard to accept; or they even don’t know what VI is. Suppose you are in this situation, it will be better to pick a popular color with consensual meanings according to your brand image and concept.
When you indeed have no idea how to make a decision, black, white, grey, and original brown are always good choices. Or you can take your logo’s main color as the dominant tone, then turn the logo in its contrasting color.
Many people know that there is a design skill is to use color to arousing emotional resonance. Take the basic color CMYK in paper bag printing as examples:
According to the hue, the warm-toned colors make people feel happy, positive, and jubilant. And the cool-toned colors make people feel relax, technology sense and wise.
The highly saturated colors can boost the expression of emotion, make people hyper and play a Call To Action effect. And the low saturated colors, like the lovely macaron colors, can let your customers feel gracious.
An excellent slogan can express your brand concept and let customers remember you well. Most merchants will set their slogan in their logo design, or directly print it on the paper shopping bag. Besides, some merchants also choose to print all about the company information and product specifications.
Here comes a question. All these texts are colored(black or white is a color too.) If they are in large numbers, it will form a color lump with a large area and influence the visual effect.
At this time, you need to make a trade-off of copywriting and give up the unnecessary ones. If there is much information that needs to be printed on the shopping bag, then it will be better to use clever typography to reduce the influence on the overtone.
To run promotions on special holidays is a common marketing method. During these days, preparing the shopping bags with festive air for your customers can greatly improve the favorable impression. For example, offer green and red paper shopping bags on Christmas, pink and carnation ones on Mother’s Day, and champagne for Valentine’s Day.
Bonus: Several color matching tool sites which often used by designers.
Sometimes, you can get a satisfactory and amazing result at a low cost with creative designs. Let’s see some interesting creative design paper shopping bag cases.
The shopping bag offered by this shoe shop took white as the main color, highlighted the pure black printed pattern, and set a large logo at the bottom. Without any thinking, you get it is a shoe brand immediately. The most clever thing is that this shopping bag uses the shoelace as the handles, matching the pattern perfectly. Suppose to replace the real shoelace on the pattern with printing, this will be excellent packaging at a low cost.
This paper tote bag is similar to the previous case. Because the household electrics are made from metal, the self-color of the products is not apparent. Thus, the merchant picks the attractive gold as the dominant tone, showing the products better by a stronger contrast. Likewise, it also matches the handles with the power line in design, showing creativity.
Because fitness is a service but not a tangible product, the designer expresses it through a skipping woman on the paper bag. With a simple text logo at the bottom, the whole style is concise. The black and white color also shows the focus during exercise. The handles are designed as the rope in the woman’s hand, which is very awesome.