We speak to Vincent Villéger, product, packaging and retail designer to learn more about his award-winning luxury work and plans for the future.

Hello Vincent, can you tell us something about yourself? 

I am a product designer, specialising in the design of packaging for luxury and beauty brands.

Over the course of my career, I have produced designs for prestigious brands such as Givenchy, Yves St Laurent, Dunhill, Pangaia and Molton Brown.

I also worked in-house at Burberry for eight years, under the tenure of Christopher Bailey. I was brought in to create and lead the packaging design function - including retail, e-commerce, beauty and licensed product. At Burberry I created bespoke papers and materials, redesigned the retail packaging to introduce many sustainability improvements and created many perfume bottles such as My Burberry, Burberry Sport, Burberry Body and Burberry Bespoke.

I am a consultant now, based in Wimbledon, South West London where I work by myself. This holds key appeal for my clients, as it enables me to establish a privileged direct relationship with the brands I support and ensures there is nothing lost in translation in the process from briefing through to concepting. Of course I call on a trusted network of independents to support tasks such as visualisation, artworking, or prototyping.

Another key difference in the way I operate, is that I remain involved in the project beyond design sign-off, throughout the development stages. This is where issues are uncovered, and creative solutions need to be brought to the table in order to preserve the original creative vision of the client.

After all, nobody cares what brilliant but unviable designs live on my Mac. It’s only relevant if it can actually happen and I often say “it doesn’t matter what I design, it matters what we make.”

Photo credit: Burberry

Photo credit: Molton Brown

What's your main area of expertise? Can you share with us your journey into to the world of design?

I trained both in Paris and in the UK, gaining a few Product Design degrees. These two countries have such different approaches to creativity and design : the French are very conceptual, whilst the Brits are very functional. So now I have a healthy mix of both.

I am a product designer first and foremost, and this sensibility to 3-dimensionality - be it materials, structure or tactility - is central to my approach to design.  I’m also interested in user experience and I think a lot about how a piece of packaging is being used over a sequence in time when unboxing. For this reason, I think of packaging not as a three-dimensional discipline, but as a four-dimensional discipline.

I always say “there is more to designing packaging, than printing graphics on a box”.  Early on in my career I specialised in packaging design for luxury and beauty. In fact my first commercially released design was for Issey Miyake Perfumes, when I was still a first year design student.  I haven’t really stopped since.

Today my speciality is the design of packaging, product and p.o.s. for luxury, beauty and creative brands. I spent many years agonising over whether I should strive to be a broader creative, but I now appreciate that finding my niche has served me well.

Photo credit: dunhill

Photo credit: Handover

What does the power of design mean to you?

The luxury sector is a very expressive category compared to FMCG, which is mostly performance driven. You get to work with the most wonderful materials, and collaborate with incredibly skilled people. The objective for my designs in the world of beauty and luxury, is to initiate the spark of a dream in the consumer.

People buy it because they love it - to me that’s design’s greatest power: to bring tiny pockets of joy and beauty into the world.It’s a resolutely lighthearted thing to be spending your life doing, which I like. I take lightheartedness very seriously.

Don’t forget the Bronze award in the “Best Use of Colour” category, in partnership with Pantone!

My primary focus is always to find the right solution for the client - sometimes it means producing a solid design, but that may not necessarily meet the criteria to win awards. I only submit projects that I feel add something of interest to the conversation.

It’s always nice to gain peer recognition and for me, as a small consultancy, winning awards is also a way to raise my profile. Hopefully it makes it easier for the next client to find me!

The Pentawards Gala generates quality conversation and networking, it’s a very polished event. As an independent designer interactions with peers are few and far between, so it’s nice to take some time at the end of the year to meet up with everyone, and to celebrate everybody’s successes. Ours is a small industry and it pays to support each other.

Also as a winner you get to parade down the catwalk - what’s not to like about that?!

Platinum Award Winner 2023 - BY FAR: Daydream Fragrance Collection. Photo credit: By Far

Vincent (right) collecting his 2023 Platinum Award at the Pentawards Gala Ceremony

Can you talk us through the journey of creating BY FAR's Daydream Fragrance Collection, the inspiration and challenges in bringing the pack to life?

The By Far team were very clear about the objectives for this project: they wanted it to be playful and provide an opportunity for interaction beyond merely spraying the fragrance. Beyond that, there was a lot of creative freedom, and this really helped steer the project creative."

My idea for this project was to design it as a fashion accessory, not a perfume bottle.

The brief was to create something with consumer interaction at its heart, something playful. To achieve this, I made the bottle refillable. Typically, brands use 100ml refills to decant into 100ml bottles, but I chose to decant into a 20ml bottle. That means the bottle can be smaller, portable. That’s when it becomes a fashion accessory, which you can hook over your handbag.

The other layer that I added to the design was to make it customisable. We produced it in a range of six colours and designed four different strap options. So if you combine that with the seven fragrances available, that gives you 168 possible combinations!

This is perfect for the By Far consumer because they are an audience who is really keen to express themselves through their fashion.

There were some technical challenges of course but we collaborated with great production partners (T.N.T. Group), who really understood the vision and pulled out all the stops to deliver it.

Which part of creating the pack did you and the team love the most?

The modularity is my favourite aspect of it.

Of course it is fun for the consumer to pick one of 168 combinations. But from a business perspective, it allows the brand to inject newness into the range by simply producing new colours, or new strap designs. This plays to their strength as a fashion brand, and means they don’t need to rely on complex fragrance developments to keep the category fresh.

It was really fun when the samples started coming in, and we could experiment with seemingly endless possible combinations of colours, finishes and forms.

Platinum Award Winner 2023 - BY FAR: Daydream Fragrance Collection. Photo credit: By Far

Photo credit: By Far

You will now be looked at for inspiration. What is your message to young designers or students who are entering the design world?

You mean the last 25 years have meant nothing up until now? ;-)

Creativity is a wonderfully privileged way to earn a living. My message would be don’t try to be all things to all people. Finding my niche has been one of the most useful business strategies for me - albeit it was totally accidental.

It doesn’t just happen overnight, and it’s unlikely to be a fully linear path. So embrace the journey in all its meandering glory. There’s learning in all of it.

And finally, you have to put in the work - nobody really owes you anything. So get your head down, learn the craft and keep that ego in check. The best creatives I know listen way more than they talk.

Are you currently working on any exciting new projects?

I am increasingly getting involved in the design of retail spaces, which I love. Also I’m currently doing some work for a few Whisky brands, which I am enjoying tremendously.

In addition to this, I am working on a few perfume bottles, skincare, brand redesign projects, as well as some home fragrance designs. It’s very varied, which I like. And my clients tend to be lovely, which makes all the difference. I invest a lot of time in my work, and over time I have become increasingly keen to ensure it’s spent dealing with good people!

Finally, where do you see yourself heading to next? 

I am keen to try and give my work a more personal flavour.

Of course as a designer, my job is to fulfil the client’s objectives. But I am keen to start expressing a more personal voice alongside my commercial practice, where appropriate.

I am planning on doing more personal work, which will be helpful and a great way to stay in touch with my first love of product design too. I want to make more things in collaboration with some of the great production geeks I have met along the way!

I have noticed some great camera and watches brands with amazing products but relatively dated packaging experiences - so if any of them are reading this, do get in touch!

Photo credit: Aidan McCarthy

Find out more about Vincent on Instagram or via his website, and enter this year's competition for a chance to be a 2024 Award winner!