Designalytics Effectiveness Awards Puts Spotlight on Innovative Brand Packaging

Seven brands were named winners of the 2025 Designalytics Effectiveness Awards.

Designalytics recently announced the winners of the 2025 Designalytics Effectiveness Awards, which honor some of the best packaging designs in the industry. Below are three of the award-winning packaging designs that caught the attention of our editorial team. These articles were provided by Designalytics.

Solely Emphasizes Fruit Focus with Packaging Redesign

Manish Amin, VP of marketing at Solely, described an experience he thinks perfectly conveys how unique Solely’s fruit jerky product is. He was talking to a buyer at an industry trade show and put an actual mango and guava next to the brand’s Mango Guava product. Amin mentioned that the pieces of fruit were the only ingredients in the Solely product. “The guy said: ‘This doesn’t have gelatin or sugar?’ This was an industry professional, and he actually looked at the ingredient list on the back,” Amin said. “He couldn’t believe it was just fruit. That’s how remarkable this product is.” 

That simplicity is the foundation of Solely’s brand, but it's not easy to overcome the feeling that your product is too good to be true. When Amin joined the company in 2022, he felt that the packaging wasn’t working hard enough to get that message across. “We were seeing good traction, but there was an opportunity to reflect the product and the brand more clearly and succinctly,” he said.

Amin collaborated with two agencies to accomplish this, starting with Fortnight Collective, a global agency based in Boulder, Colorado. Fortnight was tasked with helping clarify and crystallize the brand’s overall positioning, as well as handling redesigns and other assets for Solely products. “Previously, Solely was hiding its most important and differentiating brand attribute — it’s 100% organic fruit,” said Andy Nathan, founder and CEO of the agency. “The goal of our brand positioning and package design was to make this very important difference clear.”

Fortnight completed its work quickly (the agency prides itself on moving swiftly from kickoff to completion), defining the brand platform and distilling the brand down to the phrase "the fruit, the whole fruit, nothing but the fruit.” The agency then conducted broad design exploration, ultimately creating the packaging design system, and led photo shoots as well as the creation of assets for several of Soley’s products, including the fruit gummies and dried fruit.

Matt Kubis, creative director at Fortnight, believed this work created the foundation upon which to build the brand further. “The platform we created was all about being truthful, bold, and honest. We gave more clarity and prominence to the integrity inside of every Solely package,” he said.

Armed with strong company positioning, Amin then enlisted Bex Brands, the San Diego-based design agency that has worked with better-for-you brands like Suja and Good Karma. In the creative brief, Amin made clear that while Solely had many great stories to tell — flavor, organic ingredients great relationships with farms, etc. — the brand needed to focus its messaging. “You can't deliver 15 messages in the one second you have with consumers at the shelf. And that's what we were attempting to do with the old design,” he said.

Of course, grocery aisles are filled with products touting their purity (consider how many brands include the word “Simple” or “Simply” in their names), but no one had a stronger story to tell than Solely. Jeremy Dahl, co-founder and creative director at Bex Brands, knew that while the fruit itself would be the star of the packaging, conveying that it was the only star would be next in line of importance.

“You're talking about only one or two ingredients in the product,” Dahl noted. “Consumers love the idea of simpler, cleaner ingredients, and if you look at Solely’s competitive set, no one else can compare on that front. Combine that with the delicious flavor of Solely, and it’s an exciting story to tell.”