Packaging Designer for Premium DTC Brand — Full Brand Guidelines Provided

We're a premium direct-to-consumer brand preparing our packaging for production, and we're looking for a packaging designer to take our work from strong concepts to finished, print-ready reality. Our brand identity is fully developed and documented in a comprehensive brand book, with exact color values, a defined typography system, signature graphic devices, and clear usage rules. We also have packaging concepts we believe in — the direction, hierarchy, and visual system are established. But concepts are not finished packaging, and we know it. We need someone with the craft and the eye to elevate them: sharpening the typography, perfecting spacing and proportion, resolving the details that separate a promising comp from packaging that looks inevitable on a shelf. The project runs in two phases. First, the refinement phase: you take our existing concepts and make them genuinely excellent, working within the brand system rather than around it. We want your design judgment here — where a concept is weak, we expect you to push back and show us better, as long as better still speaks our brand's language. Once the design is approved, the production phase begins: finalizing artwork across two closely related products that share one layout system with defined color variations, designing all remaining panels including a back panel structured for EU regulatory text, and delivering flawless print-ready files to our manufacturer's exact specifications — dieline, bleed, color separation, everything a printer needs to run the job on the first pass. Brand name, product category, and format details will be shared once we shortlist. You'll be set up to succeed. We provide the full brand book, the current concepts, a detailed written specification, the manufacturer's technical requirements, and all copy. We review quickly and give consolidated, specific feedback — you'll never wait days for a decision or decode vague notes. The project is structured in clear milestones with defined revision rounds, and if the collaboration works well, there's ongoing work as our product line grows. The right person has done both halves of this before: refined real packaging designs to a premium standard, and taken them through production — and can prove it with printed results, not just concept renders. You have strong typographic instincts, real prepress knowledge, and the discipline to treat brand guidelines as a contract while still improving what's inside them. Experience with EU-market packaging is a meaningful plus, and fluent working English is essential.