Branded Packaging Made Easy: Custom Printed Rigid Mailer Envelopes Over the years we have accumulated one of the best assortments of mailer envelopes in the industry on our Globe Guard® green packaging store. All types, ranging from our padded bubble lined poly mailers to our...
A quick stroll through our Salazar Packaging gallery will show the number of great looking boxes we have helped create for e-commerce and subscription programs. What is not quite as obvious is how many of them wisely used screen printing to help minimize cost and...
If you are a regular reader of our blog you probably know we recently had the opportunity to help Madison Reed redesign their primary color kit shipper. (See first related post below) The end result was a smaller, greener shipper that has been a hit...
Image by tomsaint11 via Flickr We spend a lot of time talking and writing about eco-consistency from a marketing and customer relations perspective, especially in how it relates to secondary packaging. We are convinced that boxes, tape and other packaging materials say something about our green...
The standard width of pressure sensitive box sealing tape is 48 mm (2"). The standard width of paper box sealing tape is 72 mm (3"). These standards are both compromises, and as a result, they lead to an unnecessarily high amount of packaging material entering the waste stream.
Extreme Pressure Sensitive Tape Solutions
1. For machine applied PST applications, use 36 mm (1-3/4") wide tape. Unless the box is particularly heavy and/or subject to rough shipping conditions, the reduced width will not compromise box integrity. When in doubt, test. It is worth the time to test, though - the payoff is a 12% reduction in the amount of material entering the waste stream.
Image via Wikipedia
Printing a logo and/or a brief sales message on paper box sealing tape or corrugated boxes makes total sense from a marketing perspective. The cost is minimal The message is usually seen by several people as the package moves through the distribution chain Printing converts...
The photo above shows the three items we ordered whose combined volume is 582 square inches. The box they used was a 16” X 10.5” X12.25” high, which provides 2,058 square inches of packing space. Because the box was almost four times larger than it had to be, 600 (un-inflated) square inches of an inflatable void fill product had to be used to fill the oversized void. Before you think this is just another story of a packer using the wrong box to fill an order, the green “wanna be” picture gets much worse for Staples.
OK, I will admit we do not yet have an official Globe Guard Eco Consistency award, but if we did, it would be darn prestigious and we would award to Citizen Watch Company. That has to be worth something, right? The fact is that we, like so many others in the green business, are quick to criticize when companies are inconsistent in their packaging. Therefore, we should also be ready, willing and able to point out when they do something positive.
Making Sure the Packaging “Fits” the Product
Rightsizing is a given but making sure that the package is sustainably appropriate for the product you are selling is an often overlooked detail. It seems logical doesn’t it that if a watch maker creates a watch series they decide to name “Eco-Drive” it is going to appeal to people like me who believe we all use way too many battery powered items in our daily lives. We are also almost certain to scrutinize the packaging and see if it is consistent with the product it contains.
As a marketing specialist, I myself find it strange that at the same time we're promoting Globe Guard 100% PCW content corrugated boxes, we're writing post upon post telling people how to use less corrugated or no corrugated at all.
Well, we definitely want to sell Globe Guard boxes. Being made from 100% post-consumer waste, they are the ultimate in sustainability from a materials standpoint. But at the same time, our experience in packaging tells us this -
The biggest cost saving AND the best environmental consequences come from using less corrugated material in your operation.That's why we openly encourage corrugated users to use less corrugated, and offer suggestions about how to do it. But the real mystery is this. Why do so many customers fixate on the purchase price of their boxes, when changing their box requirements will produce far greater savings? A couple reasons come to mind.