Services — Packaging Design · BFS Studio, Ho Chi Minh City
Tết packaging for Vietnam's gifting season
Tết is the biggest gifting week in Vietnam and the shelf that week is a wall of red and gold. A pack that only says “festive” disappears into it. We start from what the brand already owns — a crest, a chevron, a founder, a colour — and let the season change the material, not the identity. Limited editions, VAPs and gift sets, shipped on the print calendar the season actually runs on: brief in April, artwork locked around June–July, on shelf in October–November. Rigid box, folding carton, VAP or GWP — the tier changes the timeline more than the idea does.
START A BRIEF ↗ ( 01 )
WHAT YOU GET
- Seasonal concept rooted in brand assets
- Limited-edition carton and rigid box
- VAP and GWP gift sets
- Structural mock-ups in real material
- Key visual and campaign adaptation
- POSM, display and retail kit
- Print-ready artwork, press check and approval on foil, lacquer and embossing
- Multi-year system that carries across seasons
( 02 )
SELECTED WORK
![[ yellow tail ] — Tết 2026 — Tết Packaging case study](/images/covers-v2/yellow-tail.avif)
( 03 )
QUESTIONS
- When should a Tết pack start?
- Brief in April for a season that ships in October–November. Artwork locks around June–July, because rigid boxes, foil and lacquer all queue at the same printers at the same time.
- Does a Tết pack have to look traditional?
- No. Ballantine’s read its chevron as dragon scales, Royal Salute folded a palace flat. The season gives you an occasion, not a mandatory vocabulary of peach blossom and gold.
- Which brands have you done Tết packaging for?
- Royal Salute, Chivas Regal, The Glenlivet, Ballantine’s, Aberlour, Imperial Blue and [ yellow tail ] — most of them for Pernod Ricard Vietnam.
- How much experience does BFS have with this specific category?
- Six Tết seasons of packaging for spirits and wine brands, most of it for Pernod Ricard Vietnam — Royal Salute, Chivas Regal, The Glenlivet, Ballantine’s, Aberlour, Imperial Blue and [ yellow tail ] have all run on the same Tết print calendar and faced the same one-week shelf test.
- What’s the difference between a limited edition, a VAP and a GWP?
- Three different products. A limited edition changes the primary pack itself — highest impact, longest lead time, no fallback if artwork is late. A VAP (value-added pack) puts the standard bottle inside a gift box or sleeve without touching the core production line — it’s the workhorse of the category, decided later and designed on a larger surface. A GWP (gift with purchase) is a glass, pouch or tin that travels with the bottle — cheapest to change, and easiest to get wrong: a gift nobody wants is a cost, not a gift.
- Rigid box or folding carton?
- Rigid if the pack has to feel like a gift in the hand — wrapped setup boxes, magnetic closures, foam or EVA cradles. Folding carton if volume and shelf presence matter more than weight, and the pack needs to ship flat. [ yellow tail ] runs on carton and reads across a supermarket aisle because the artwork was drawn for the fold, not applied to it. Choosing structure last turns a design into a drawing — the crease finds it every time.
- What does a Vietnamese printer need from the artwork file?
- Layered artwork on the approved dieline, not a rectangle. Spot colours named, not “matching the PDF.” Foil, emboss and spot-UV on separate marked layers, plus a material and tolerance sheet — board weight, lamination, coating. And someone from the design side at the press check: most packaging goes wrong in the gap between the approved file and the running machine, and that gap isn’t something email closes.
- How do you know a Tết pack is actually finished?
- Stand it next to four competitors on a red-and-gold shelf, at arm’s length, under supermarket lighting. If the only thing telling a shopper which brand it is, is the logo, the pack isn’t finished yet.
- Does the same system have to be redrawn every season?
- No — that’s the point of starting from what the brand owns rather than from Tết itself. Royal Salute runs two tiers, RS21 and RS24, off one architecture across two seasons. The Glenlivet kept the same founder, George Smith, across three consecutive years, so 2023, 2024 and 2025 read as one story instead of three unrelated boxes.
- What if the brief lands late — after artwork should already be locked?
- The realistic fallback is a VAP or GWP rather than a limited edition: the core bottle stays untouched, so the timeline compresses to the gift box or accessory alone. A full limited-edition run started in August is racing every other brand in the category for the same press slots, with no room left to fix a bad first proof.
- Do you supervise print production, or just the design?
- Both. We don’t run the presses, but someone from BFS is at the press check for foil, lacquer and embossing runs — the stage where Tết packaging typically goes wrong, not in the file.
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