Background
Last Crumb is a luxury cookie company offering Michelin-star quality desserts, handmade in Los Angeles, packaged with the zeal of the finest wines, and sold like streetwear across the United States via limited edition drop, direct-to-consumer online.

Due, to a great extent, to a thoughtful and memorable unboxing experience at the heart of its business, Last Crumb has gone viral online in just one year with every drop of their $140 Dozen Cookie Boxes selling out in less than 30 seconds, generating millions of dollars in sales and a waitlist of over 200,000 customers, including celebrity fans like Kim Kardashian.
Last Crumb has enjoyed success with a $0 marketing budget by creating word-of-mouth around its unboxing experience. As a direct-to-consumer, luxury food brand, developing a packaging experience became a central component of Last Crumb’s business in order to compel people to purchase without first smelling, tasting, or seeing the product in person. As such, our packaging needed to warrant the brand’s premium pricing and create opportunities for sharing on social media.

To achieve these goals, we began with the development of a brand identity and language that embodies qualities of luxury, boldness, rebelliousness, and minimalism in order to distinguish the brand from conventional bakeries that are typically feminine and rustic.

Packaging Introduction
With sleek and organized black boxes, semi-transparent individual matte-finished cookie pouches, and a 40-page cookie coffee table magazine, unboxing Last Crumb was envisioned as an experience that exceeds the simple, nostalgic pleasure of enjoying a cookie at your favorite local bakery or grandmother’s kitchen.

Shipper Box
The experience of receiving Last Crumb begins with a memorable shipper, made of 100% recycled card stock, that arrives on your doorstep. While most brands overlook shipper boxes, Last Crumb’s is a whopping 3-foot-wide box overlaid with a collage of brand imagery and a satisfying tear-line through the cross in the brand’s logotype.

Cookie Box
Opening the shipper box reveals, an interior black box features elevated foil finishes like the brand’s logo sleekly imprinted on the top of the box, along with small details like the brand’s icon emblazoned on the box’s side panels and messaging in small foil print that demands consumers “Open The Damn Box.”

Once they follow these instructions, their eyes meet a collection of twelve distinct cookies, each presented at a 45-degree angle, like at a high-end retailer for a wow moment worthy of sharing on social media.

Creating this experience necessitated engineering a custom insert to prop up each cookie and hold it in place during transit. This custom insert sports a collage of branded imagery in black and white. Foil messaging on the back panel of the box includes the cookie collection name as well as our slogan “Never Crumble.” The full interior box is made from 100% recycled, premium card stock.

Cookie Bags
Individual cookie bags include a distinctive cookie name, like “Better Than Sex” for the chocolate chip, “The Floor is Lava” for the chocolate lava. Each bag includes a matte-finished top half that previews each distinct cookie’s look and feel and together beautifully presents the variety across the entire set of cookies.

The bottom half of each cookie bag includes not only the product name but also, a unique serial number indicating its collection number, cookie number, and year of release – a subtle detail that represents our efforts to elevate the otherwise generic category of cookies.

The back of each cookie bag includes poetic tasting notes and inventive descriptions that offer some whimsy and delight to the brand and some individual personality to each cookie. These descriptions have been read aloud on Instagram and TikTok by celebrities like Chrissy Tegan and Doja Cat, becoming a central part of the brand’s viral reception on social media.

Finally, each cookie bag is nitrogen flushed and sealed to maintain peak freshness for over 2 weeks and made from fully recycled materials.

Photography
Photography plays an important role in the brand and packaging experience. Working with our photographer Audrey Ma, we aimed to create evocative, delicious, and almost sensual imagery of cookies that took its cues from editorial fashion photography.

Cookie Magazine
Finally, Last Crumb’s cookie magazine is an expansive brand showcase designed to be a coffee table mainstay. It includes descriptions of each cookie, the aforementioned photography, and details about the ethos of the brand and the process behind the baking of their cookies.

Summary
We’ll conclude by mentioning that this project is near and dear to not only our mouths but also our hearts. With Last Crumb, packaging isn’t just a container for a product. It is the product. We hope that more than simply being a memorable customer experience, that Last Crumb is a showcase for business owners to invest in the power of packaging and design to create unique and disruptive positioning in the marketplace.