The state of our packaging union is strong.
At least, that’s what we’re telling ourselves as we’re proud to announce the 2024 Dieline Award Winners because, hoo boy, we have seen the absolute best in packaging design once again.
Dieline Awards, now in its 15th year, remains one of the world’s largest global packaging design competitions. Sponsored by Designalytics and presented by Luxe Pack, Dieline Awards 2024 recognizes the best and brightest designers and agencies creating product packaging worldwide, raising awareness of the enormous value of brand packaging design.
Today, Dieline announced its 2024 Dieline Awards winners, presenting trophies to 137 recipients across a whopping 41 categories, not to mention our 13 overall top winners. The awards were presented onstage in New York City at Luxe Pack New York.
This year, Dieline received over 1,400 entries, with winners from 27 countries. Taken together, the prize-winning recipients offer a snapshot of where the packaging industry is heading, not only with bold and innovative designs but with many brands committing to plastic-free materials. Here, you’ll find some of the best design agencies, studios, in-house teams, and independent designers in the game today.
The awards’ jury chairs featured a who’s who from the world of design—luminaries like Brian Collins of New York and San Francisco-based COLLINS, Coca-Cola vice president of global design Rapha Abrea, Utendahl Creative founder Madison Utendahl, Interact Brands creative director and partner Fred Hart, and A Plastic Planet and PlasticFree co-founder Sian Sutherland. All entries for the awards were judged by a panel of jurors who are experts in their given field. Additionally, awards were evaluated across five categories—creativity, marketability, innovation, execution, and on-pack branding, with every entry going through two rounds of rigorous critique and appraisal.
So, are you ready for some joy-scrolling? Well, get a pot of coffee going—here are all of the 2024 Dieline Awards winners.
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BEST OF SHOW
Sitch Hair
by Lyon & Lyon
Our most Larry David shower complaint is that round shampoo and conditioner bottles are trash because if you’re not rocking a shower caddy, more than likely, you’ll bump the bottle, and it will fall to your feet and maybe even break one of your little piggies. Then the shower shelf gets all wet and slippery and soapy, and when you put the bottle back, it just falls again.
Keep up with us here.
That Lyon & Lyon gave the haircare brand Sitch packaging with flat backs so it can rest against the shower wall alone makes it a very clear and evident Best of Show winner.
Luckily, our esteemed jury agreed. Maybe they also have too-narrow shower shelves, but it’s hard to root against a tesselated packaging system featuring 9 SKUs in different sizes and formats that’s just flat-out fun to organize into a haircare city (which looks great at the store, salon, or, yes, the shower). What’s more, the brand launched with a refillable packaging system, because why should any bath or beauty brand in this day and age keep selling you a seemingly endless stream of plastic bottles?
STUDIO OF THE YEAR
Wedge
Nine Ds—that’s the most Dieline Awards any studio has ever won in one single year in the competition’s history.
And who else could it be but Wedge? The Montreal and LA-based branding and design studio clearly put in the work this year, and we wouldn’t blame them if they just booked a well-deserved vacation as they won for four different projects—OMY Laboratories, Paro, Cha, and Festif. If you’re keeping track, respectively, that’s a skincare line, a South Asian pantry brand, a sparkling prebiotic tea, and an aperitif that’s as cute as a button, making them the new go-to generalists on the block.
With a guiding philosophy of “everything can be special,” it doesn’t take a master’s from SCAD to see why they’re racking up wins and are a studio worth watching as they continuously leave their mark on the world of branding.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
OMY Laboratories
Wedge
There’s no fun in having your own awards show if you can’t pick out an award yourself—hence, the Dieline Editor’s Choice Awards.
Anywho, we love a good refillable skincare system, but we like it even better when it has our name on it. And that’s precisely why our editorial staff landed on Omy Laboratories. The highly personalized skincare brand leans into its super-science-y nature with a refillable capsule system. Working with Wedge, the bespoke products come inside near-test tubes with a color-coded numerical system indicating each user’s distinct skincare routine. Stick the capsule inside its corresponding fancy glass jar, and you’ve got a skincare regimen worth writing home about.
Add an elegant black wordmark, white bottles, and a few pops of color to indicate the product, and you have an easy-to-navigate system. What’s not to love?
PLASTIC-FREE INNOVATION OF THE YEAR
Vivomer
Shellworks
We don’t like to wade into the recycling doesn’t work debate (our tl;dr—it probably doesn’t, but we also need it to). Frankly, we wish packaging would just kind of…disappear?
And with our 2024 Plastic-Free Innovation, that’s just what you get.
Shellworks‘ Vivomer is a vegan and compostable mono-material consisting of microorganisms found in soil and marine environments—essentially fish food. The natural polyester material performs like plastic (it works best as tubs and jars) and, when thrown away, will completely disappear within 52 weeks. Better yet, it leaves no microplastics behind.
Now, Shellworks has released the world’s first home compostable mini bottle made from a flexible and blow-moldable iteration of their original material, Vivomer. Considering that most travel and sample-size bottles are unrecyclable, this gives the beauty and bath industry a viable (and scalable) material.
“This year’s PlasticFree Innovation of the Year is a standout for its potential to disrupt an entire, heavily polluting sampling industry that currently relies on tiny packages of plastic that remain in the environment for centuries to come,” said Sian Sutherland, co-founder of both A Plastic Planet and PlasticFree. “Shellwork’s Vivomer material is a material of the future, able to return harmlessly to the Earth to feed the next iteration of life, harnessing the creative power of regenerative design to create a pack that doesn’t just do less harm; it does good.”
REBRAND OF THE YEAR
Togo – New Visual Identity
Marimo
There were plenty of significant brand redesigns in the past year, but this one took our judges by surprise. And we can’t blame them—who doesn’t want a nice Italian cookie covered in chocolate?
Working with the Italian agency Marimo, the Italian biscuit brand Togo wanted to maintain its core look while appealing to a new generation of consumers. Ultimately, they got a bold brand restructuring—yes, it feels the same, but it’s also decidedly not. The logo gets certifiably chonk-ified and thickened and is propped up by electrified graffiti (blue for Latte, orange for Fondente) and a black canvas. What’s more, there’s even a cookie-inspired cartoon mascot because, hey, why not?
Marimo didn’t skimp on the redesign, and they absolutely swung for the fences. The end result? A cookie for Nonna and her grandkids.
DESIGN FOR GOOD AWARD
The Only Drop
The Scotch Malt Whisky Society
STCKMN
Now, in its fourth year, The Dieline Design For Good Awards honors the agencies and creatives who take up the issues and necessary causes meaningful to them, creating work that gives back to humankind while emphasizing kindness and promoting a higher quality of life.
Working with STCKMN (Glasgow, Scotland designer Chris Wilson), the Scottish Malt Whisky Society—a club we’d really like to join—celebrated their 40th anniversary in style with a literal one-of-one whisky that went straight to auction at Sotheby’s.
And why? To help raise money for The Youth Action Fund, an organization that assists young folks in Scotland by giving them the work skills and confidence to transform their lives.
The whisky, appropriately dubbed “The Only Drop,” comes in a handcrafted paper sculpture highlighting the relationship between the liquid inside and the sherry cask it was aged in for 33 years. STCKMN also used wood shavings from the casks and incorporated them into the sculpture itself. Moreover, the boozy gold is symbolized by a ripple formation, with a lone drop speaking to the incredibly limited release.
DESIGNALYTICS DESIGN EFFECTIVENESS AWARD
CVS Beauty
CBA USA
The Designalytics Effectiveness Award was created to help elevate package design’s role by spotlighting its impact on consumer brands. As always, winner selection was entirely data-driven, based on market sales performance and rigorous quantitative consumer testing.
This year’s winning redesign went to CBA USA for its work on the CVS Beauty brand—the first private-label winner in the award’s five-year history.
For years, CVS’s Beauty 360 brand has been competing with national brands by offering high-quality beauty and personal care products. With this redesign, CVS Beauty made a revolutionary shift—eliminating the Beauty 360 branding altogether and replacing it with the familiar CVS heart while communicating product efficacy, premium-ness, and inclusivity.
Consumers “hearted” the new look, with 74% preferring this version over the previous design, and the sales results bore this out. During the six months following the redesign, sales of CVS Beauty products increased by 20% compared to the same period during the prior year.
“Every year we give this award, we see more and more compelling—and often jaw-dropping–evidence that great design drives brand growth. CVS Beauty presents a uniquely straightforward case study,” said Steve Lamoureux, CEO and founder of Designalytics. “Given the minimal advertising and promotion afforded private-label brands, this result is especially staggering; a bold, strategic design change was—clearly and unequivocally—the engine behind this brand’s growth.”
Best of Food
Smallhold
Gander
The mushroom has been making waves for years and has even found prominent placement in a few of our trend reports. So it was only a matter of time until someone made packaging that resembled a toadstool.
Enter Smallhold’s Mushroom Pesto, our overall Best of Food winner.
When it comes to stuff we nosh on, Gander doesn’t miss, as they have previously designed category-shaking products like Magic Spoon and Graza. Smallhold grows specialty mushrooms via vertical farming, and with its latest pesto made from food waste—i.e., ugly and discarded shrooms—they’re offering consumers an umami-packed sauce for dipping and spreading. Yes, you’ve got a toadstool-shaped top, but the label also cleverly uses the silhouette of a mushroom stem. It’s both simple and brilliant and further deepens folks’ love of all things fungi.
Best of Beverage
30 Knots Distillery
Clay Andrews
Spirits packaging can be overcomplicated to the point of ridiculousness. There’s overly ornate typography with several type specimens, a surplus of botanical illustrations, badges and stamps galore, palm fronds, olive branches, and Art Deco-whatevers. Sometimes, studios will try to build in a sense of mystery and intrigue that often feels too vague and falls flat.
Sydney-based freelance creative Clay Andrews specializes in drinks branding, and his entire repertoire of skills was on display for 30 Knots Distillery. While the client specifically asked for “nothing too fancy,” and Andrews delivered a “purposefully undesigned” bottle, we would argue that our Best of Beverage winner is a Goldilocks in that it’s designed just right.
Thankfully, this lighthouse-inspired bottle doesn’t share any DNA with the Robert Eggers’ feature of the same name. Instead, you get windswept type, colors inspired by Australian terrain, and a heady melange of embossing, foils, and texture with nothing overdone—again, it feels just right. What’s more, not only is it a fest for the eyeballs, but it’s a tactile container that invites touch.
Best of Health, Beauty, & Personal Care
Uoga Uoga Kids
Andstudio
Andstudio set out to make bathtime great again and succeeded with our overall Beauty, Health, & Personal Care winner, Uoga Uoga Kids (although, to be fair, in our day, a drama-free bath meant not burning your eyeballs out and hopefully having a bottle of baby shampoo close at hand).
As our own Sarah Fonder put it, “Uoga Uoga Kids anthropomorphize soaps, shampoos, and lotions by giving them adorable faces kids can decorate with reusable stickers. Fitting the brand’s dedication to sustainability, the bottles and stickers are both made of recycled materials and are fully recyclable, making the experience good, clean fun in more ways than one. The purple sans serif packaging is stylish and simple enough that adults will probably like it too (and, let’s be real, probably won’t be able to help themselves from playing with them).”
So, yeah. All you need are a few eyeballs and a pretty solid Prince-purple, and you’ve got a stress-free bubble bath. You’re welcome, parents.
Best of Home, Shopping, & Other Markets
SmartDevil
Shenzhen Tigerpan Design Co., Ltd.
Tech packaging is riddled with waste. Think styrofoam, unnecessary plastics, and over-packaged presentations that have more to do with an experience that feels like an exercise in waste prevention.
As it turns out, sometimes all you need is a little corrugated cardboard—hell, you don’t even need glue. Shenzhen Tigerpan Design’s packaging for SmartDevil’s screen protectors does just that by relying on its dieline’s interlocking properties. While the recycling factor is an obvious plus, you can’t overlook how the brand uses stylized type-inspired graphics to translate exactly what the product is, making for a bold and fun presentation.
Best of Brand Identity
Togo
Marimo
Working with the Italian agency Marimo, the Italian biscuit brand Togo wanted to maintain its core look while appealing to a new generation of consumers. And what you get is a bold restructuring of the brand’s look—yes, it feels the same, but it’s also decidedly not. The logo gets certifiably chonk-ified and thickened and is propped up by electrified graffiti (blue for Latte, orange for Fondente) and a black canvas. What’s more, there’s even a cookie-inspired cartoon mascot because, hey, why not?
Marimo didn’t skimp on the redesign, and they absolutely swung for the fences. The end result? A cookie for Nonna and her grandkids.
Best of Sustainability
UniSleep
Hangzhou XIVO Design Co., Ltd./ UniSleep
It still boggles the mind that you can order a product online packaged in a box that has to ship in another box. And the product itself usually comes wrapped in plastic. Is it some kind of cruel joke or does Jeff Bezos have a weird Russian nesting doll kink?
UniSleep, however, gets it. Instead of using multiple layers of packaging for their pillows, you get one box—period. The same one that protects the product is also used for shipping, and the pillow comes in a reusable cloth bag. Product information about the pillow also comes printed inside the packaging, i.e., no excess paper. Once folks get the package, it unfolds from the outside to the inside, giving them a pretty nifty, unboxing experience.
FOOD
Breads, Cereal Pasta
Dairy or Dairy Alternative Products
Sauces, Oils, & Spices
Fruits, Veggies, Fish, Meat, and Meat Alternatives
Ready to Eat, Fast Food, Meal Kits
Confectionary Desserts and Sweet Snacks
Savory Snacks
Beverage
Water
Soft Drinks
Tea & Coffee
Functional Beverage
Beers, Ciders, & Malt
Low-Alcohol and No-Alcohol
Wine & Champagne
Clear Spirits
Dark Spirits
Ready To Serve Cocktails
Heath, Beauty, And Personal Care
Clothing, Fashion, And Fragrance
Health Care
Body Care
2nd Place
Baude Bodycare, Darkwave Utopia Collection
Baude in-house team, in collaboration with SOS Beauty Group
Beauty & Cosmetics
Home, Shopping, Other Markets
Household Maintenance & Home Improvement
3rd Place
TREEJUMP Laundry Beads Packaging
inDare Design Strategy Limited / TREEJUMP
E-Comm Packaging
Electronics, Office, E-Commerce, Entertainment
Baby, Kids, & Pets
Tobacco & Cannabis
Plastic Free
1st Place
WASTECARE™: Industrial waste — certified as skincare.
Serviceplan Innovation & Workbyworks Studio
