Category: suprtrue

Every brand wants a box for their products, but which one? Most of the time, they don’t know for sure. Blogger box, seeding box, shipping box, e-Commerce Box, gift box, set box, folding box, … We explain the differences and what to look out for when making your selection.

Anyone who wants to make an impression with their packaging not only pays attention to the look, but also relies on the experience that a package gives when unpacking it. “Unboxing” can be a real joy, a feeling of excitement, full of anticipation and full of curiosity, or it can cause great disappointment and thus contribute significantly to the image of a brand.

It is worth taking some time and investing to find a functional and attractive solution or ideally have it cosntructed. You want to prevent the box from being unstable and the product being damaged as a result of the material not corresponding to the value of the contents and the products sliding around in the box carelessly. Likewise, an eye for detail and fine-tuning is worth a lot.

 

 

WHAT GOES WITH YOUR BRAND AND PRODUCT?

Ask yourself the right questions and you will turn your box into a hero product:

1. Should the packaging (e.g. as an e-commerce box) be sent directly?

If so, we recommend a corrugated shipping box. These can be printed on the inside and outside and, if necessary, an insert can be inserted to fix the products. This saves you additional shipping packaging.

If you want to remain flexible and the products are not too sensitive, a filling material is recommended. Tissue paper strips with your own logo or unprinted cardboard scraps in various shapes are particularly chic. A closure label and a note card should not be missing. For a special finishing touch, there may also be some color inside or on the outside of the box. A little story can be communicated via texts inside the box or with the help of a label and note card.

2. How does your product need to be protected and how heavy is it?

Options are often excluded in this way. For very heavy or glass products, stable materials and constructions must be chosen and shipping tests must be carried out. A corrugated cardboard box is also recommended here. If the products are not sent directly, other versions are also possible, e.g. the so-called rigid box, which is, for instance, known from the mobile phone packages from  Apple. It is also stable and suitable for heavy products. However, since its production is very complex, it is not the cheapest option and is therefore more suitable for high-priced products or gift sets.

3. What are the desired quantities and the timing?

We can offer a certain selection of standard folding boxes from as little as 50 pieces in a relatively short production time of approx. 15-20 working days. If you have more time and higher quantities, corrugated cardboard and rigid boxes are also an option.

Budget

It is true that the more parts, the more finishing and the higher the quality of the paper, the more expensive the box. Furthermore, the quantities are extremely decisive for better unit prices, since the set-up costs for production or the tooling or printing plate costs are always the same — regardless of whether you order 50 or 50,000 pieces.

The different boxes at a glance:

Folding boxes (various construction variants possible)

This packaging is produced flat and is particularly suitable for products that are not too heavy. The boxes can be wonderfully refined and can also be implemented in smaller quantities.

Maybe Palina Presenter is interesting for you? Check it out.

Rigid boxes

Solid cardboard blanks are covered with printed paper. The difference to a folding box is that you don’t see any folded walls, flaps or open edges. This variant is expensive, especially for small quantities and cannot be delivered flat.

Shipping boxes

Suitable for direct mail or very heavy products. Like the folding box, it is also delivered flat and can also be produced in smaller runs using digital printing.

Sustainable insert variants are e.g.: paper / cardboard insert, moulded paper or mycelium.

The latter looks like this: Molly Mycelium

Paper bag, bag pack or a paper can

Maybe it doesn’t have to be a box at all? Fashion accessories and textiles also fit well in a paper tube or a high-quality paper bag with a printed image and label. It is a stylish goodie for an event or an eye-catcher in the shop.

On the subject… you might like these suprtrue products:

Bernie Bag Pack

Cara Capsule

A New Plastic Economy

… or how to pave the way to the circular economy

Think about the end at the beginning? One prefers not to do that, but when it comes to packaging design, it’s worth taking a forward-looking approach – especially when it comes to plastic packaging and recycling.

In aspiration of a circular economy, the principle of “design for recycling” is held high by designers. But what makes good recyclable plastic packaging? What design details should packaging designers pay attention to?

We take a look at the most important points and explain how the vision of the circular economy can bear fruit:

Plastic packaging still gets a bad reputation, however it is a must-have for certain products. For the vision of a circular economy for plastic to become a reality, plastic should never become waste. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which studies the topic extensively, describes this as the initiative of the New Plastic Economy. The vision has six goals:

Eliminate and innovate

Avoiding unnecessary and problematic plastic packaging by giving innovation a chance, developing new designs and establishing new (more efficient) delivery systems and models.

Away from single-use packaging

It is important to develop models that reduce the need for disposable packaging.

The development of better plastic

In the future, the use of plastic will be completely decoupled from the consumption of finite resources and all plastic packaging will be free of dangerous chemicals. The health, safety and rights of everyone involved are respected.

Enable and practice reuse

Ideally, all plastic packaging should be 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable in a way that is implemented in practice. Particular attention should be paid here to what the respective waste recycling plants can achieve. In practice – in Germany, as in most other countries – there is still no bioplastic composting available on an industrial level.

Furthermore, the melting points of different plastics differ enormously. PET melts at around 240 degrees Celsius, polyethylene at around 100 degrees Celsius. Consequently, recycling PET for food and beverage applications is easier as the higher temperature kills any contamination. In the case of polyethylene, only downcycling to, for example, a garbage bag, would currently be an option.

So much for the theory, but what does this mean for the producer and design industry? How can you specifically support recycling processes as a designer? Keep these principles in mind:

Principle 1 // Use light (transparent and clear) plastics.

Many sorting machines have infrared systems that can only detect light-colored (most transparent clear or transparent light blue) plastic. Colored, and black plastic is then simply sorted out into the residual waste, where it then goes into the garbage incinerator. In order to increase plastic recycling quotes, choose a light-colored plastic if possible. Clear, unpigmented PET is the easiest and cheapest to recycle. White and colored (non-transparent) bottles can contain pigments that cause contamination during recycling and result in coloring that is undesirable in the food and cosmetics sectors.

Principle 2 // A good plastic packaging can be completely emptied.

Everything else does cost recyclers additional money and means more effort, even though less valuable recyclate can be filtered out.

Principle 3 // Very important: Use mono material instead of a mix of materials.

Proper separation is the prerequisite for plastic packaging to be recycled. The combination of different materials or composites should therefore be avoided at all costs. Barrier layers can also prevent packaging from being recycled. Ideally, a single type of easily recyclable polymer is used (PE-HD, PE-LD, PP or PET). Admittedly, this is a real challenge, especially with food packaging. Since these packages have to fulfill a multitude of functions in order to ensure the durability of the products, many thin layers of different materials and plastics are often necessary. These can only be separated using state-of-the-art techniques and costs. And so we come to the next principle.

Principle 4 // Components should be able to be separated or detached without great effort.

If several materials have to be used, then all components should be easy to separate from one another. Closures, labels or sleeves should detach easily and when using glue, attention should be paid to detachability (e.g. water solubility). In order for the components to be separated successfully, transparent communication with the users is necessary. Comprehensible instructions for waste disposal are precious.

Conclusion:

There are many adjustments to be made in order to optimise the path to a circular economy with increased recycling rates. Above all, two things play an important role: On the one hand, the establishment and expansion of a functional recycling infrastructure is necessary –including modern waste collection and good sorting ability. On the other hand, clever cross-border design solutions can already make a major contribution in the right direction, or to put it another way, the focus on “design for recycling” is even more important if mature systems are still missing. Good design has the ability to change the world.

Need a detailed guideline to design for recycling? Click here.

Unbox the suprtrue way with less products, less packaging, more commitment!

With this naturally beautiful packaging, products made of glass and other delicate materials have a safe journey. The inlay, developed for the beauty brand The Skinfluencer, is made of mycelium (mycelium), a natural and biodegradable fungal material. It is a perfect fit for forward-thinking companies that want to be pioneers and use fewer but more functional products.
The Skinfluencer shows how it’s done and values ​​a high-performance cult product. A simple solution to the complex issue of skin. A product that works. Your daily go-to, or in other words, 3-in-1 skincare with clinical results. Anti-aging treatment. Moisturizer and barrier protection.

The Skinfluencer credo stands for a new brand philosophy that runs through all areas: “As much as necessary, as little as possible. It starts with the ingredients and ends with the packaging: Consciously selected ingredients, local production in Munich laboratories and recyclable, partially biodegradable packaging.”
With the latter you refer to your innovative insert variant made of mycelium.

Fantastic mushrooms: why mushroom instead of plastic inlay?
Mushrooms have many properties that can help us make better products. They expand and weave into shapes that maximize surface area and load-bearing capacity while wasting little energy. These root networks grow naturally and withstand enormous internal and external pressures. Mushrooms are therefore real top performers and have great future potential. The packaging and fashion industry, but also other industries, can take advantage of this opportunity. Stella McCartney sees the potential of fungi and has already developed collections made from vegan mushroom leather.

 

Project: The Skinfluencer packaging including label design and set / shipping packaging.

Customer: The skinfluencer
Year of construction: 2022
Agency: Packaging Circus GmbH x suprtrue

A NEW MINDSET: THE VISION TO MAKE A CHANGE

The overall mindset is changing, we are living in a so-called neo-ecology. Environmental awareness is ever-present and it is asking for optimized and smarter solutions within the economy. It goes beyond rethinking a product alone, it is about changing entire systems to make processes smarter, more efficient and circular.

We, as brand visionaries and packaging designers, do see the issues within the world of packaging and wish to make products, designs and systems smarter and more sustainable without compromising on design and style. Our approach? We digitize the process so that companies can easily develop, design and order their conscious and brandable packaging collections online.

But let’s start from the beginning.

THE COMPLEXITY OF THE PACKAGE DESIGN PROCESS

Imagine you wish to launch a beauty product and you need a functional and attractive cosmetics bottle. This bottle alone is made of several parts and needs further add-ons, which all come from another supplier – the bottle itself, a matching closure, the label, the folding box and the insert or the eCommerce shipping box around it. All these pieces have to match and stylistically go hand in hand in order to become a meaningful end product with low impact on the environment that, ideally, can be fed into the cycle again.

Up to the finish line of receiving a functional design, there are many potential sources of error which make the final packaging less ideal with regards to product performance, sustainability and, from experience, lack any sense of style that luxury and fashion brands are yearning for.

A common packaging design process and the development phase are very stressful and time-consuming. Without the help and expertise of a design agency in the field, it takes several weeks or months and sometimes additional money until you have found suitable production partners to work with and to bring an idea to life.

With an agency specialized in the whole packaging process and knowing the drill, the process runs much smoother if you are willing to make an invest. Design has its price and is most definitely of value, particularly, if you decide to go for individual tooling to create a unique structural design, there will be even higher costs coming your way.

THE DEMAND FOR SUSTAINABILITY & THE NEED FOR QUALITY MANAGEMENT

With packaging, we make products last longer, move them from A to B, maintain their hygiene and communicate their value and use. In the light of the sheer amount of packaging waste we deal with every day, there is a big demand for sustainable packaging design solutions that reduce the impact on our planet.

Certainly, the market replies to the high demand of sustainability. It is swamping us with numbers of solutions. However, as a non-packaging specialist, it is hard to rate the quality of those solutions and it is even harder to find ready-made pack products that can be quickly adapted to your brand’s need. Every supplier is offering another piece of the big puzzle, there is no one that holds all the important threads and sews them together. What brands need is a coherent collection, transparent communication and pricing, as well as quick previews of the final designs.

 

THE PACKAGING INDUSTRY NEEDS A (DIGITAL) MAKE-OVER

This is where our suprtrue idea comes into the picture. suprtrue.com is a one stop shop, where you can get it all – sustainability, design, functionality. Even though our products are standardized, we strive to offer uniqueness. We are sourcing the best that is out there and we are working closely with producers to improve their collections with regards to sustainability, design and level of attractiveness.

Our aim: To develop novel solutions and to find packaging use cases for innovative materials, to make them available as a standard design through our shop.

In a nutshell, suprtrue allows businesses and brands to designand order their own custom-branded packaging with the help of a user-friendly web application which works like a modular design & construction system. The ultimate goal is to provide a coherent and aesthetic packaging collection, from primary to secondary pack to shipping box – all carefully selected with regards to their eco-conscious character.

We follow the approaches of “less is more” and “design for recycling” and moreover either choose materials that are a 100% recycled, have a lower impact than conventional solutions or are made from natural ingredients that can be home-composted again. Further, we closely follow trends and endeavors to create new innovative materials.

The suprtrue dream? To collaborate with research institutions and co-create an innovation hub, so that we can make a giant leap inside the packaging design industry. But let’s start with one milestone at a time.

Let’s start here and let’s start now and let’s be suprtrue together.

suprtrue is brand of Packaging Circus GmbH.