Designing products considering logistic costs and improved customer service in the field of supply chain management is termed as design for logistics (DfL). By improving the design of the products for logistics, organizations can reduce the costs spend on logistic and delivery. Some of the critical factors of adopting DfL are ease of transport, ease of packaging, ease of loading/unloading, minimize logistic cost, and so on. To improve the DfL characteristics at the product design stage, five strategies, namely flat packaging strategy, design for non-circular subparts, modular design principles, and design for ease of fabrication, have been identified. Quality function deployment (QFD) approach, a successful method often used for new product development, was used in the selection of strategies for designing products from a logistics viewpoint. The results of QFD show that flat packaging strategy and ease of handling are the critical DfL strategies for the improvement of logistics characteristics of the product at the design stage. The methodology has been tested through a real-case application in a packaged drinking water manufacturing organization. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.