Five things to have ready before the first meeting. Shorter than most founders expect, and it is where the weeks get saved.
Five things, and none of them is a brief. The list is short enough to finish in a week, and the one that catches most brands out is the mandatory information: a US label carries 5 required statements at fixed minimum sizes, taken from the FDA’s own labelling rules, and that text needs its space reserved before anything else is drawn.
Five things to have ready
What you need to prepare before a packaging project starts is shorter than most people expect, and it saves weeks. Bring the full product range you intend to cover, including anything launching within the year, because a system designed for four products behaves differently from one designed for fourteen. Bring the physical constraints: formats, materials, print process, and the printer’s specification if you have one. Bring the mandatory information for every market you sell in, since that text takes space and cannot be added later without redrawing. Bring whatever brand assets exist, including source files. And bring the decision maker, because a range approved by one person and revised by another is the most expensive way to run a project.
What each one costs you if it is missing
The consequences are not evenly spread, which is why the list is worth working through rather than skimming. Two of the five need defining, because founders often think they have them when they do not. A printer’s specification is the document that states what a given press can hold: minimum type sizes, bleed, colour targets and file format. Source files are the editable originals of the logo and the artwork, not the exported images that sit in a presentation.
| If this is missing | What happens | When you find out |
|---|---|---|
| Full range, including next year | The architecture is sized for today and breaks at the next variant | At the next launch |
| Print process and printer spec | Colour is approved on screen and reached differently in production | At the first print run |
| Mandatory information per market | The panel is fitted last and pushes the design out of position | At artwork stage, or at the border |
| Source files | Elements get redrawn from a flattened image, slightly wrong | Immediately, as extra cost |
| The decision maker | The range is approved once and revised by someone else | Halfway through, as rework |
Four of the five are documents you already have somewhere. Only the first needs a decision.
Your range list, and why it outranks the rest
Four steps, and the whole thing fits on one page.
- List every product you sell now.
- Add every product you intend to launch in the next twelve months, including the ones you are not sure about.
- Mark which products share a format and which do not.
- Note which markets each product ships to, because the mandatory panel is sized by the strictest of them.
That single page changes the design work more than anything else you bring. The coding layer is the set of signals that tells one product apart from another inside the same system: a colour, a word, a numeral, a panel. A system built for four products distributes that layer one way; the same system asked to carry fourteen needs the coding decided differently from the start. Adding the fourteenth to a four-product system is a redesign, and it arrives at the worst moment, which is when you are already committed to a launch date.
The mandatory information, market by market
Mandatory information is the text a regulator requires on the pack, at a size the regulator sets. It is the part founders reliably underestimate, because it is the only element on the pack with a legal floor under it.
A US dietary supplement label carries five mandatory statements, a Supplement Facts panel with body text no smaller than 8 point, and an absolute floor of 1/16 inch on every piece of mandatory text. A UK food supplement label carries the sales name “food supplement” and a minimum x-height of 1,2 mm, and the Food Supplements (England) Regulations 2003 then add five further statements: the category of the nutrient, the recommended daily portion, a warning not to exceed it, a statement that supplements do not replace a varied diet, and a keep-out-of-reach-of-children line. In the Gulf, GSO 9 makes Arabic mandatory, with any other language allowed only beside it. And in the UAE a food product is registered in the ZAD system before it is sold, and a change to the label means registering it again under Ministerial Decision 239 of 2018, so a pack redrawn after launch costs a registration as well as a redesign. Those rules are published, and they decide how much room is left for everything you want to say.
Collect the requirement for every market on your list before the project starts, and the layout gets designed around the largest one instead of being rescued later.
What you do not need to prepare
You do not need a brief, a mood board, or a view on what the packs should look like. Those are outputs of the work rather than inputs to it, and arriving with a fixed visual direction narrows the options before anyone has seen your range together.
You also do not need a finished brand strategy. An unsettled identity is worth saying out loud at the start: it changes the order the work runs in rather than stopping it.
Inside the first meeting
With the five items in hand, the first conversation is about decisions rather than discovery: which products share a structure, which market sets the panel size, what the print process allows, and who signs off. MarkaWorks runs that session against the range rather than against a single pack, because the range is what the system has to survive.
Without them, the first two meetings go on collecting what could have been collected in an afternoon, whichever agency you choose; MarkaWorks is no exception.
An afternoon that saves weeks
Put the five items in one folder before you contact anyone. It is an afternoon of work, it costs nothing, and it is the difference between a project that starts on the design question and one that spends its first fortnight finding out what it is designing for.
The five items on a MarkaWorks project
MarkaWorks runs the first session against your range list rather than against a single pack, and sizes the mandatory panel to the strictest market on that list before any layout is drawn. We ask for the printer’s specification and the source files in the same meeting, because both change what the artwork can do. The project those five items feed is described on the packaging and product design page.
