Retail Packaging Design Case Study: Faber-Castell Gelatos Colors

Role: Be Super Creative | Hello Delanie | Creative Lead & Design Director Category: Packaging Design / Retail Merchandising Client: Faber-Castell USA

product display design

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The Brief

Faber-Castell came to the table with a genuinely hard design problem dressed up as a simple one: take a product line with over 90 shades and make it sell itself on a retail floor, without turning the display into visual noise or the packaging into an afterthought.

Ninety colors is not a product line. It's a taxonomy. And most retail displays solve that problem by picking a lane, either the display does the selling and the packaging just holds the product, or the packaging is loud enough to fight for attention and the display becomes furniture. Neither approach was going to work for Gelatos. The whole appeal of the product is range. If a shopper couldn't see that range at a glance, the brief had already failed.

The Work

I led the creative direction on packaging and retail display as a single system, not two projects handed off in sequence. That meant:

• Designing individual packaging that reads clearly at bin-level, so a shopper can distinguish "Watermelon" from "Raspberry" from three feet away

• Building a merchandising fixture that organizes 90+ shades into a color-logic grid, so the wall reads as gradient rather than clutter

• Carrying the brand's "design, memory, craft" identity from the header signage down through every individual cubby, so the fixture never stops feeling like one cohesive object

• Working within Faber-Castell's manufacturing and brand compliance requirements to keep the system producible at retail scale

The header panel does the top-level selling, vibrant, blendable, water-soluble, permanent when dry, the pitch a shopper reads in four seconds. Everything below it is where the real design problem lived: turning inventory into an experience.

The Translation

Here's the thing nobody tells you about display design: the fixture is the packaging. A shopper doesn't experience "the product" and "the display" as two separate decisions. They experience one wall, and they decide in about six seconds whether that wall is worth their time.

So the job wasn't to make 90 SKUs look organized. It was to make the sheer volume of choice feel like an invitation instead of a decision paralysis exercise. Color families had to flow into each other. The eye had to move down the wall the way it would move across a paint chip fan, not a spreadsheet.

The Outcome

The result is a display that sells color as a medium, not just a product. It's the difference between a shelf that says "here's what we have" and one that says "here's what you could make." Faber-Castell got a merchandising system that scales across retail environments while keeping the full breadth of the Gelatos line legible at a glance, and the packaging never had to shout to do it.

Broker the system well, and the fixture becomes the pitch. #RetailDesign #PackagingDesign #FaberCastell #CreativeDirection #BeSuperCreative

Case study prepared by Delanie West, Creative Lead & Design Director, Be Super Creative.