Luxury Brand Packaging Ideas for Service Based and Online Entrepreneurs
Mar 18
If you’re a service-based company or an online entrepreneur—you might be wondering why you need to think about packaging at all. And that’s a fair question. But in this video I’m going to show you how you can incorporate luxury brand packaging ideas that elevate your service or online experience—and keep customers coming back for more!
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I’m Moriah, luxury brand designer and strategist, and I help female entrepreneurs build exclusive high-end brands so they can show up with confidence, get booked with clients they love, and finally charge what they’re worth.
A couple of months ago I shared this post, Luxury Packaging Design Basics: Tips from Louis Vuitton, and it’s quickly become one of my most popular posts!
So I thought I’d do a follow up. I work exclusively with service providers and personal brands. So I wanted to share how to incorporate luxury packaging into your businesses as well!
Why Would Service-Based Businesses Even Need Packaging?
Like I said, if you don’t sell physical products, you’ve probably never even considered packaging design. But I’m here to tell you that you’re missing out on a huge opportunity!
In this video, I’m going to share how to use packaging in your business to help create a luxury experience for your clients, and add incredible value to your services or digital products.
Selling the Intangible
The thing is, service-based businesses and online entrepreneurs, like myself, deal with the intangible. We’re essentially selling our time and expertise, or digital representations of our time and expertise. (i.e. logo designs, photography, e books, digital courses, etc.)
I know from experience how difficult it can be to price intangible offerings.
In fact, that is one of the biggest challenges my clients face.
The problem is, most of us were conditioned to believe that physical items have a higher monetary value than non-physical.
In simpler terms—we value things more than we value our time.
Now, I will very passionately argue the opposite: that our time is our most precious resource. But that’s another discussion for another video.
Creating Value for Services or Digital Products
Back to the issue at hand:
Knowing that there can be a lower perceived value for intangible offerings—it is up to you, the entrepreneur, to create value for your services or digital products through high end branding.
One way to do this, is to treat your offerings as actual products.
If you can take the intangible (your service, or your digital product), and bring it into the physical realm, where clients can touch and experience it, in a very real sense, you can effectively increase the value of your offerings. Which means you can charge a lot more too.
This idea might seem pretty abstract at the moment—so I’m going to share 3 very real ways you can use a luxury brand packaging experience to elevate your services and digital products:
Tip 1 | Luxury Brand Packaging for Client Gifts
While you might not sell physical products, many service-based entrepreneurs that I know, including myself, make client gifts a big part of their brand experience.
In the wedding industry, for example, it’s common for photographers and other vendors to present brides and grooms with welcome gifts after booking.
In my business, I choose to send client holiday gifts instead. And it’s one of my favorite parts of my client experience.
If you want to know more about that, check out this post: Client Holiday Gift Ideas For Solopreneurs
Client gifts are a great way to incorporate a physical, tangible element, into your brand experience.
Remember when putting together your client gifts, your packaging can really set the tone.
Be sure to select packaging that speaks to the luxury vibe of your brand. This means choosing high end boxes, ribbons, papers, and more.
You’ll also want to choose packaging that is custom and on-brand for your business. For example, choose pieces in your brand colors and use customization elements like foil stamping or embossing to add your logo.
Tip 2 | Incorporate Physical Products into Your Service-Based Brand
One of the best ways to scale your business is to expand your offerings. There is this common belief that millionaires have at least seven different streams of income.
While I’m sure that’s not a hard and fast rule, it does make sense to have multiple income streams if you want to grow your business.
This is especially true for service providers who can easily get stuck in this trap of trading “hours for dollars.”
Your time is a limited resource. So If all you’re offering is one-on-one services, your business model is not at all scalable.
My branding clients are service providers and they LOVE their clients. They love working one-on-one with their clients, and I love supporting them in that goal.
However, I also help them incorporate other revenue streams into their brands, so they’re not relying entirely on their time to make an income.
I work with a lot of photographers—many of whom I’ve helped transition from “shoot and burn” where they’re essentially just selling their time on a photo shoot (and hand over a bunch of digital image files after) to IPS photographers.
Selling Products with Your Services
IPS stands for “In-Person Sales.” Instead of selling their time (which remember, consumers don’t really value) IPS photographers sell the physical products of prints, photographic wall art, and even digital files in a high end sales session.
Just consider the difference in the perceived value of two following scenarios:
- Shoot and Burn Photographer: Shows up on the day of the shoot, edits several hundred digital files and sends to the client in an online gallery
- IPS Photographer: Shoots session, then meets with client several weeks later to present a selection of the best 30-40 images, and guides them through the process of selecting high end prints and custom wall displays, then delivers products in luxurious on-brand packaging
Creating a Higher Perceived Value for Your Creative Services
In my own experience, working with my photography clients, many of them go from making a few hundred dollars following that same Shoot and Burn scenario, to making thousands of dollars per session as IPS photographers.
The other fascinating thing is that by giving the client less images, the photographs actually have more value. This means the photographer ends up spending less time while making more money, because they don’t have to edit nearly as many images.
Why does this happen?
It’s because their time (shooting and editing) and a digital product (image files) don’t hold nearly the same perceived value as physical products presented in high-end packaging.
Whether or not you want to incorporate physical products into your offerings, I’d love to know what you think about the 7-revenue streams idea!
Let me know in a comment below: how many income streams do you currently have in your business?
[A heartfelt thank you to my incredible client, Jessica Vallia Photography, for sharing examples of her work, products, and packaging for this video.]
Tip 3 | How To Create Luxury Packaging for Your Digital Products
For my online entrepreneurs and digital creators, you might be thinking this whole packaging thing just isn’t for you. Maybe you’ve built your empire online and you’re determined to keep it there.
And I want to tell you, you just need to rethink your definition of the term ‘packaging.’
What are you currently including with your digital products? And how can you ‘repackage’ those offerings to add value and make them more desirable?
Essentially, packaging exists to add value to your offering (whether it’s physical or not).
So think about how you can enhance your digital products or services. Here are couple of my favorite examples:
- I purchased a Photoshop template a few months ago and was presently surprised to discover it included so much more! There were beautifully designed instructions, as well as a complimentary video tutorial. These added features, packaged together with the original offering definitely elevated the value and experience for me.
- I also recently bought a digital course where all of the elements were beautifully designed and on-brand. The course was packaged with a bunch of bonuses that were also on-brand. This included a detailed email series that walked you through the process of making the most of the course.
As you can see, you don’t need to use physical packaging to elevate your brand experience. Having beautifully designed products (whether they’re physical or digital), and including delightful surprises, help to take your brand from average to luxury.
Ready to build a luxury brand that attracts your dream clients and helps you charge what you’re worth? Then you have to check out my free 20-page guide: The Brand Blueprint.
Wanna learn more of my favorite luxury branding tips to help you run a successful business? Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube Channel!
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