Nowadays, product packaging is proven more and more important, especially for retail. However, it’s always uneasy to create a unique and attractive packaging. Are there any good practices? The answer is yes. The followings are what I’ve learned from my 20-year experience in sourcing business.
1. Think of your brand
The packaging is a great way to let your brand speak. You can create a positive association with your brand by developing customized boxes and packages. It would offer a special experience for the customers to unbox the orders and find their purchased item. You have to think of your brand, business value, your target customer of your brand, etc.
2. Understand your customer
When you plan to design your product packaging, you have to understand your target customer, know what they expect from your business. After all, they are the ones who are ready to invest in your business. For instance, you are selling children’s toys, try to design your packaging with widely-known figures in the animated cartoon or fantastic playing context. This will greatly promote your sales and business.
3. Know your product size
As a matter of fact, the product size matters the packaging size. It would be totally a failure if the size of your design is not fit your product, be it larger or smaller than the product itself. For instance, the product with four different parts with different sizes should accommodate two different sizes of packages. Try to make it economic with the dimensions, and savvy with your products.
4. Consider the packaging material
When it comes to packaging, you have to know what to use to package the products. For any shoppers, they don’t want their beloved items to be housed in a wrong material box or bottles. Just imagine the house made out of cheese in the summer. It is disgusting.
5. Don’t ignore the budget
How much you want to spend on the packaging? Normally you have to consider before you start work on it. It should depend on how much profit you’d like to make from each item you sell. It may be a small part in your business, but you cannot ignore it. The budget should be vital for a startup. Remember to search the market, and have a general understanding of the market price, and then make a detailed and practical budget plan based on the packaging phrases of your product.
6. Prepare to design packaging
This part comes to packaging designing. This means you have to design something exceptionally beautiful on the packaging with all the info available and convince the target customer to buy the contents. Besides, you have to know the packaging types of your products. You have to be clear about your product attributes, for instances, liquid drinks should be kept in bottles instead of the box. And then you can’t ignore your budget and your website positioning. Try to make it different with a limited budget by comparing with your competitors.
7. Design your product packaging
Then it comes to the packaging design part. You have to determine the packaging layers and the type of packaging based on the product attributes. If you are not good at the graphic design, a professional designer will be the best choice for you. But you must have your own idea before you ask a professional designer to design your packaging. Share it with the designer about your brand identity, and the competitors’ packaging designs. And the designer will give you’re their idea about the packaging color, look, and feeling.
If you can design the packaging by yourself, it should be your task. You have to choose the software such as Adobe Photoshop to design a 3D packaging image to fit your products. Prior to this, you can refer to your competitor’s packaging and figure out the difference of your product. Include all the key ingredients of your brand identity and the descriptive info of the product. Try to make it unique to stand out and easy to trigger the emotional engagement of your customers. If possible, you can invite friends, families, and co-workers to give some feedback on your design. Or you show them several designs and let them choose the best one in their eyes.
8. Have your designs printed
Finally, you have to have your designs printed. As we know there are different parts of the packaging material. And you have to have them printed out separately according to your packaging requirements. For instance, you have labels, scanner code, logo, and other informative descriptions. You have to print these key brand identity ingredients with different printers. Try to communicate with the printer to get the specifications of the printer needs. If the packaging is designed by the designer, make sure they’ve discussed on that. And the printer is clear on it. Besides, the file format is vital in printing. If the format is wrong, the solution should redo the work or work on the file format. If this is the situation, your cost would likely to go up.
Take the shipping scale into account. This means you have to print your designs based on your shipping speed. You don’t have to print too much and load it there for orders. Generally, you should never stock more than half a year of packaging in case of the labeling regulation change despite some of the packaging forms keep constant for years. And the pressure sensitive label adhesive only has a guaranteed shelf life for one year. It can lose its adhesive properties if it stored incorrectly.
9. Optimize your product packaging
From time to time, we’ve come across different packaging for the same products. It is caused by product packaging optimization in line with the time change. In a nutshell, you must have a clear understanding of the product packaging. Hopefully, you will find the above tips useful for your business. Your packaging is definitely to deliver what is your brand, and what it means to your target customers. Never miss the opportunity to create a lasting impression on your target customers.
