When it comes to subscription boxes, your packaging is an essential aspect of the customer experience. Creating a positive unboxing experience makes your brand memorable and keeps customers engaged with your subscription service month after month. Having custom printed subscription boxes also creates opportunities for consumer-made shareable content like unboxing videos or social media images that further promote your brand.
So how can you ensure that your packaging is helping you to capture repeat customers? Below are the important elements to consider when designing your custom printed subscription boxes.
The material of your subscription box is absolutely crucial for both protecting the products inside of it and ensuring that your vision for the design is feasible with accurate, consistent printing. Corrugated is an excellent material for subscription boxes due to its durability, the ease of printing on it, and its sustainable qualities.
Since corrugated is made up of three sheets of paper (an inside liner, outside liner, and ruffled fluting in-between), it perfectly balances durability against shipping hazards while being lightweight enough to keep shipping costs down. It’s also one of the most recyclable packaging materials, making it ideal for companies who want to reduce their negative environmental impact while sending out mass monthly shipments. Since today’s consumers prefer more eco-friendly brands, the importance of using sustainable packaging materials is high and rising.
Lastly, a vast variety of printing options are compatible with corrugated boxes. This helps to make sure that your initial design idea is achieved as accurately and as cost-efficiently as possible in the final product.
On the topic of printing, choosing the right printing method (or combination of methods) is essential in fulfilling your design. Having multiple options like digital, offset, and flexographic printing can help ensure the right method is used to achieve your vision flawlessly.
Digital printing uses an inkjet or laser to print the digital image directly onto corrugated. It is great for producing vibrant colors, handling more complex design elements like gradients, and printing more specialized, smaller-to-medium runs.
In offset printing, the inked image on a plate is printed onto a rubber cylinder which then transfers it to corrugated. It’s known for turning out crisp and clear results and being incredibly cost-effective when producing large quantities. Specialized inks are also able to be used (like metallic or Pantone colors) with this method.
Flexographic printing uses plates wrapped around rolling cylinders — one for each color used. The design elements on each plate are raised, with only the raised parts receiving ink and then transferring it to corrugated. This method is ideal for long runs, as it runs at extremely high speeds and handles all aspects like printing, die-cutting, laminating, and varnishing at once.
Working with a G7 certified printing facility gives you peace of mind when it comes to consistent printing of your custom boxes. A G7 expert will be able to manage colors, processes, and quality control for your packaging, as well as efficiently handle any printing issues that may arise. This helps to ensure accuracy across your print for consistent branding that instills consumer confidence.
Another crucial element to consider in your custom printed subscription boxes is the size and shape of your packaging. Having the correct size of box with the right cushioning eliminates void space inside, which is especially important for subscription services sending more than one product in the same box, as it keeps them from knocking against each other and causing damage during shipment.
Right-sized packaging also helps you save on shipping costs, which is crucial for businesses like subscription box companies that rely on the ability to ship out their curation of products monthly. In general, smaller and lighter packages are cheaper to ship. However, monthly subscription boxes may need to be larger depending on what type of items they’re holding, since they contain multiple products in one shipment.
You’ll want to make sure you understand dimensional (DIM) weight principles — which most transportation companies have adapted to in order to determine the price of shipping packages larger than one cubic foot — if you have a larger subscription box. Essentially, billable weight of large packages is decided by dividing the volume of the package by a constant called the DIM factor, decided by each individual carrier. The billable weight is then determined by the larger of the actual weight and the DIM weight.
Understanding how DIM weight works will help you to make informed decisions about box size based on the resulting price of shipping. When you work with an experienced packaging solutions provider, they can help to guide you in the right direction to meet your goals and your budget.
Since 1951, Dusobox has been the one-stop shop for solving all of our customers’ packaging dilemmas. Our team’s acute eye for design aesthetics paired with skilled packaging engineering ensures that your packages reach their destinations unscathed — and capture consumer attention upon arrival.
We’re constantly innovating in our work to help you delight your customers. That’s why we’ve started incorporating one-on-one mobile communication technology for our subscription service partners to help better connect them with their subscribers and increase consumer loyalty.
Dusobox is a leading designer, engineer, and manufacturer of custom corrugated display solutions and product packaging.
COPYRIGHT © 2021 DusoBox. All Rights Reserved.