Spotlight: Taylor Box Company
In our current climate of shipping slowdowns and scarcity of materials, designing your client’s packaging has become extremely challenging. Fortunately, the folks at Taylor Box Company have been in the custom packaging business for nearly 140 years – long enough to know how to safely guide you around today’s unprecedented roadblocks. Follow the 5 tips below and rest easier knowing your next packaging project will come in on time, on budget, and looking its very best.
1. Get started as early as possible. It’s always a good idea to start planning your packaging design and production ASAP. But add today’s supply chain issues to the time it takes to design the packaging, get sample approvals, and to order the best materials for the job, and you can easily fall behind and miss those all-important deadlines. If you know you have a packaging project in your future, the time to start planning is now.
2. Provide your packaging maker with everything that will go into the box right from the outset. This helps them recommend and craft the best packaging design possible – especially when it comes to creating inserts that will prevent items from rattling around loose inside, getting damaged and losing presentation value. Remember, you and/or your client have already made a significant investment; getting the fit right is crucial for creating that oh-so-important quality impression.
3. Don’t be afraid to share your budget – and deadlines – with your packaging partner. Because the cost and availability of materials is fluctuating so rapidly today, it’s vital for your manufacturer to know how much you want to spend per piece right away, as well as when the final product needs to be at your doorstep. This information helps them to locate and acquire costs on the exact materials within your budget; it also enables them to plan ahead to ensure your packaging is ready to go when you need it.
4. Create a checklist that includes all your packaging requirements. The more information you can provide about what your packaging needs to accomplish and what qualities it must have, the more satisfied you’ll be with the finished product. Here are just a few of the questions you should ask yourself:
- Should it have an elegant, simple design or should it be more intricate with extra “bells and whistles” (foil stamping, die cuts, etc.)?
- Does it need to fit inside a mailer or shipping container of a particular size?
- Should it be made from recycled materials and/or be 100% recyclable?
Providing answers to these and other questions ahead of time will help your packaging partner save you time and money and increase your satisfaction rate.
5. Share packaging samples and/or images that impress you or that you think capture some of what you’d like to see in your own packaging. Whether it’s a screenshot of something cool you found while dipping into Pinterest at 3 AM or even packaging that you designed yourself for another client, be sure to share it with your custom-box maker early on. Remember, the sooner you can give them an idea of what you’re looking for, what you can afford and when you need it, the sooner you can rest easier knowing that you’ll be satisfied with your packaging.
Ready to start planning your next custom packaging? Enter to win a 3-piece set of Design Notes notebooks right now – we have 250 sets to give away! Each notebook features graph-paper pages as well as line drawings of all the different box styles – perfect for sketching out those packaging ideas! Hurry, this contest ends Sept. 15th! (North American entries only, please.) [THIS CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED]
