Designing packaging for TruStar by Asian Paints — their line of specialised painting tools and abrasives — came to Fish Do It one brief at a time. The journey began with a single pack refresh for sanding papers and grew over two years into a distinct family of packaging systems across two product lines: Trustar abrasives and Trucare painting tools.
Looking back the brief was always the same at its core: make this look like it’s worth choosing at a slight premium compared to the competitor products.
Summary
Across both lines, we designed 18 SKUs in two years. Several involved structural design i.e. designing the physical form of the packaging, not just what goes on it. As well as master graphics. In a market where 3M was the only other player with genuine brand presence, packaging that looked considered and premium, was itself a competitive advantage.
The insight that shaped everything
Abrasives and painting tools are commodities. In India, they’re bought at packed hardware and paint supply stores where consumers stand at a counter and ask for what they need. There are no aisles to browse, no packaging to pick up and examine. The shopkeeper hands things over from behind the counter.
This is fundamentally different from developed markets where packaging is designed to be picked up, turned over, and compared on a shelf. Here, the pack needs to work at a glance, from a distance, across a crowded counter.
That insight became the one thing we kept coming back to, brief after brief.
The work
For the Trustar range — 2 sanding papers, cutting wheel, grinding wheel, fibre disc and flap disc labels, containers for fibre discs and cutting wheels, and saw blade packaging — we built the identity around the Star in TruStar.
“Star wala pack”
A die-cut star on the front of the sandpaper pack through which you could see the actual paper itself. The star pattern repeated across the backing. For the discs, wheels, and their monocartons and tin containers, the purple star pulled from the existing Trustar identity paired with white gave the entire range a striking palette — easy for consumers to ask for and easy for shopkeepers to identify without trying too hard.
“The only paint brush with packaging that looks like a premium ice cream brand”
We got the idea for the paint brush packaging one day while grocery shopping. Ice cream sticks sold in paper boxes were consistently priced higher than those in plastic packs. The same product, different packaging, different perceived value. That observation became the structural logic for the brush pack — a paper box format that made the brush feel worth more before anyone had even used it. The design became a structural system that was used across multiple brushes including region-specific packs. It’s distinct enough to stand out on a crowded counter, premium enough to signal that this wasn’t just another brush.
“Tiranga wala brush”
NeoBharat is a mass-market brand of latex wall paints launched by Asian Paints. For its brush range, we built on the same ice-cream-stick-inspired packaging structure and took inspiration from the Indian tricolour for graphics: an intricate interweave pattern that was instantly recognisable. This design shortcut worked because it was instantly recognisable for the people buying it and tied well with the brand name.
“Agarbatti pack wala roller”
The client’s brief was to create a premium roller pack that dealers could personalise by printing their shop name and phone number on the pack — and by choosing the cover + roller stripes + handle colour combination from four colour options.
Our job was to find the right structure which worked around real constraints: a tubular roller can’t go into a plastic wrapper without looking cheap. Shrink wrap squeezes the bristles of the roller out of shape, destroying the very quality that makes this roller worth buying i.e. its ability to produce a smoother, silkier finish than cheaper alternatives. The bristles need room to breathe.
The hexagon was the natural answer. It gives the roller space, it stacks cleanly, and it prints well. The inspiration again was the recognisable shape of an agarbatti pack — immediately distinctive against a market of plain plastic wrappers. We then worked closely with the client’s production partner to tweak the tooling to allow for faster assembly and variable data printing on a limited surface.
Through these 18 SKUs, we designed distinct visual languages which gave people a “language” to ask for the pack they wanted by describing its pattern, colour, icon or design.
Packaging Design, Structural Design · 2 years