ANTALIS has announced the winners of its 2025 student packaging design competition.
For the fifth consecutive year, the firm teamed up with Brief Cases for the Smart Luxury Packaging event. This year, for the first time, the competition was run in collaboration with Staffordshire University.
The event forms part of the university’s graphic design and illustration courses. Students were tasked with creating standout luxury packaging for the cosmetics sector, using materials from Antalis’ paper and paperboard ranges.
The brief required participants to imagine themselves to be the creative lead within a fictitious high-end start-up cosmetics company driven by ethical and environmental issues. The task was to create a packaging concept that would ‘surprise and delight’ customers.
A judging panel of six industry professionals reviewed entries according to relevant criteria, including packaging design, recognising opportunity, impact, commercial viability, brand strength, and presentation.
‘Highland’, submitted by student Harry Jones, was chosen as the winning entry. Highland is a packaging concept for a luxury beard care range inspired by the rugged beauty of the Scottish Highlands. The products, crafted using 100% natural ingredients sourced from the area’s rich botanical landscape, are all presented in packaging boxes constructed from Eska Greyboard wrapped in Olin Origins 120gsm paper.
Silver was awarded to Erin Hurcombe with her tattoo vibrancy serum, ‘Vivid’. Awarded joint bronze were Benjamin Griffiths for men’s self-care brand Strux, and Klaudia Kiernoziak for Washi, a Japanese-inspired skincare brand for Generation Alpha.
Steve Chappell, graphical board development manager at Antalis, said, “It was exciting to see what the students at Staffordshire University would come up with, and we weren’t disappointed. They showed wonderful design talent and a strong understanding of the role of substrate choice in packaging design.”
