If you've been around for a while, you'll know it's been a long journey from building our serving boards, to finishing, to testing, to creating a customer experience, to refinishing services, and FINALLY....to PACKAGING!! We took some time to research what type of packing we wanted to go with...but here's what we ultimately decided on ....(for now)....
Check out the video we made all about it!
Like we talked about in our previous blog post, we need to keep the cost of these boards under $100 so that the majority of our customers (hopefully mostly realtors) can easily justify the cost and will want to buy multiples. After they fall in love with the boards, we want the receivers of the boards to contact us to buy furniture.
But how do we make them fall in love with our products when all they've seen is a cutting board?!
We give them an unforgettable packaging EXPERIENCE!
Big picture, we knew that we'd need to use some sort of box to package the boards in since they were going to be sent directly to the consumer. As for what type of box.....we needed something durable and affordable....enter the thick cardboard 'subscription' type box.
But then came the hard part....what do we make it look like?? What do we put inside of it?? What should it say?? Honestly, we decided not to answer that question ourselves because there are plenty of massive companies who have been doing packaging perfectly for YEARS. So who's an OG for successful packaging.....Apple! That's where our research started.
We had some boxes leftover from when we bought our Apple MacBook Pro and our Apple Pencil (for the iPad). We opened up those boxes again and really paid attention to what we saw. We ended up doing the same with our Isotunes box because their packaging looked pretty nice too.
Here were our findings:
Not all of the packaging needed to be practical. The less practical certain aspects were, the more luxurious it felt. Did Apple need to make a custom matte black envelope to place their instructions in? Nope! But did it look really nice and match the rest of the box interior? You bet!
The first emotion we felt when opening the boxes was 'overwhelmed'. We had so many things to see and look at before we ever got to the product itself...building our anticipation! And honestly, the fancy packing just made us HAPPY!! We were excited about the product. That was the feeling we needed to duplicate with our own packing.
So after doing our research, we boiled it all down to 4 aspects to include in our board boxes:
Nice box: durable, yet pretty to look at
Wrapper: material covering the product to build suspense
Filler: material surrounding the product
Branding: simple, but obvious branding throughout
These 4 things combined would give our customers a positive emotional reaction to receiving our products!
For the box, we decided to go with a rectangular, foldable cardboard box with our branding and custom colors incorporated. When it came to size, we made sure that the boxes would hold both our cutting boards AND serving boards since we don't want to pay for 2 separate boxes that are essentially holding the same product.
For the wrapping, we used simple freezer paper!! We wanted to wrap the boards in some sort of paper material, but we didn't want our finish to create 'grease stains' on the outside. Since freezer paper is lined with plastic on one side, our finish won't bleed through. We then tied a strand of twine around the paper-wrapped board.
For the filler, we went with little strips of crinkle paper. This is a great material because it's light and won't add to the shipping cost. They come in a ton of colors and are recyclable. A good site to find crinkle paper in bulk is ULINE, a company known basically worldwide for their commercial products.
Our branding was both outside and inside of the box, but we really utilized the inside for advertising how to find our social media pages. We also bought a custom stamp to place on the paper wrapper.
Overall we're really happy with this packaging, but it's probably not our final iteration!! We always want to be learning, growing, and improving, so we're not shooting for absolute perfection right out of the gate! We understand that right now, we just need some good packaging to get us started, and as we sell more product we can take what we're learning and make even better packaging! Don't slow positive progression because you haven't reached perfection yet!
This post may contain affiliate links for products we used to create this project! If you’d like to check them out, we do get a small percentage of the sale and they are of no extra cost to you! It all goes towards supporting the content creation of Jennie and Davis. BUT – we do not take tool sponsorships and there were no tool endorsements. Just our honest opinions!
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