How to get packaging made for my product

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of the Peterman Design Firm, and today we're going to talk about packaging, specifically answering the question, how can we get packaging for a product? How do we get it made and get it for a product that we're producing? And I've been asked this by, you know, Companies who are actually developing brand new packaging for brand new products. Well, I've gotten this— this comes up with companies that are dropshipping products, but they want to create their own packaging that works well with it. And as well as people that, you know, they're just using— maybe a company is using an off-shelf packaging, but they want to move over to a custom packaging option that better fits their brand, better fits their customers, and things like that. And so There's a few things to keep in mind, and the first thing is packaging is exactly the same as product development in that it requires designing it, it requires creating technical documentation to get it made, it requires prototyping. So there are a lot of steps and very similar steps involved in packaging, and especially for If you're doing more complicated packaging, something that pops up when you press down on it, if it's something that has lighting, you could end up having electronics in it. You could end up having a lot of things put into it depending on how complicated you want to go. And so whether you're doing it for dropshipping a product or whether you're doing it for your brand new custom product, Those steps need to happen. You need to do concepting, you need to figure out, you know, and you need to figure out what's the packaging supposed to do. Is it protective? Because not all packaging is. Is it cosmetic? Is it to allow additional information? So that is especially common in cosmetics and food where The actual product is in one container. And then because of regulations or because of additional information that needs to be shown, you end up having to put your bottle inside of a box that has more print space. And half the reason to do that is because you actually need more space to print all the words that you're supposed to print. But it could also be because you want the product to look larger or take up more space on a shelf so you can catch somebody's eye better. You know, those are— not everybody needs larger packaging, so there's also ways to minimize the packaging size as well. The process that you go through once you concept it, once you design it, we then have to go prototype it. And a lot of times prototyping is pretty easy. The great part about packaging is that Typically, prototyping packaging is a lot cheaper than prototyping a product, especially if you're doing boxes and bags. They're very easy to do. There's things that you can do that are off-shelf or almost off-shelf. So there's a lot of companies that produce specific packaging that are, you know, a specific box that you can open up and they just build it in different sizes because it's all folded and scaled and they have the tooling set up and they can just kind of scale it in whatever dimension you need to. So there's a lot of off-the-shelf options that allow minimal customization. Obviously printing, printing is a huge part of labeling and often one of the most customized things. You'll see products in basically the same box over and over again. You can just walk down any cereal aisle, it's the same box. It's being made probably by the same manufacturer that's actually making All the cereal boxes, and there might be minimal die changes in cut length and shape, but it really just— it's all rectangle, still gets folded the same way, still gets glued in the same way with the same glue, and it's just printed with a different design on it. And so those kind of things are really a lot— there's ways that you can be cost effective in your in your packaging design. Getting packaging done requires its own set of design skills and suppliers. It's very rare when you go out and you get packaging made, it's very rare that the company who makes your actual product will make or design or be a part of the packaging part because packaging is its own thing. There's specialized packaging designers. There's— for protective packaging, there's entire companies that just specialize in developing custom solutions for protecting your products. A great example, I did work for a company called Barefoot Sound years ago now, and We had to— we ship large studio speakers, and in order to ensure that the speaker not only was protected from fall damage, but that the foam and padding around it didn't rub off the paint while it was being shipped— so it could just be jostled a little bit, but, you know, making sure that it didn't rub off paint or scratch the speakers because they're expensive studio speakers. We're talking about $10,000 a pair of speakers. minimum, you don't want to receive a scratched product. And so the pack— we worked with packaging company to develop specialized foam casing in order to protect it from damage, but also protect it from any kind of scratching. And so there's like multiple bags, then the foam protectant, then double boxing. And a lot of work went into it because it's heavy. Yeah. So these are, these are speakers that are pretty big, they're heavy, they're gonna, they're gonna be dropped. You're shipping it. So unless, unless you're shipping something so heavy that a person can't pick it up, your product will probably be dropped at least once every time it's shipped. So just assume that most, many products you don't have to worry about it. You can drop it, doesn't hurt it, totally fine. So you can kind of avoid this additional engineering that has to happen to make sure your product makes it there without being damaged. And it doesn't always have to be about being delicate either. These speakers I worked on, they're tough, tough boxes. We did— we've done drop tests on product before that were very, very hard to break. However, dropping and having, you know, the packaging rub against it, still cause cosmetic issues, especially with expensive products. You don't want that happening at all. As you think about all the packaging that goes into getting your phone to you, some of it is definitely the aesthetic. Some of it is definitely the user experience. Apple has done a great job of creating unboxing experiences that are good. You can look at things like a Rolex box your watch comes in, things like that. Part of it is an experience. Also is to protect the product and make sure that there is no cosmetic damage to the product when it gets there. So you got to think about what your packaging is going to do for you and for your product and the customer experience that's going to be attached to it. So looking through all those things, keep those things in mind. And when you do, you're gonna, you're gonna end up looking at companies. And some design companies will be able to design packaging as well as your product, such as mine. We do packaging and product design. I've worked on all kinds of different packaging. I just talked about the speaker company. I designed speakers and packaging. So you can— there's also design firms that only specialize in packaging. That's all they do. They don't touch anything else. And other design companies that do product, not packaging. So there's— you got to be aware that packaging can be its whole own path running on its own parallel to your actual product development because you're going to design it. You're going to have— it can be much more associated with branding. So your branding absolutely has to be taken care of before packaging. Product, you can get away with prototyping and proofing it before you get brand involved with it. But packaging is so customer-focused, so customer experience-focused, and part of marketing oftentimes. The type of packaging you choose, it could be different. We've talked about things like how to— your go-to-market possibility, how do you get a product to market? And direct-to-consumer, you probably don't have— you're probably not going to create a hanger, one of those packagings that you can hang on a hook on a wall of a store shelf. Right. Because you're just shipping it directly to a customer. They're not going to find that product inside of a store. Whereas products that you do launch that go into a store where someone's going to look at, or even online, if they want to look at a really beautiful photo, if you want to be in that space, your packaging is going to be designed differently. So you also think about your distribution model. So things like that impact packaging where they don't necessarily— you should be aware of it, but those things won't impact product development as much as they do packaging. So those are things to keep in mind. And, you know, just be aware that you're— in order to get packaging, you're going to be working with an additional set of vendors and putting different resources with different skills at work in order to create packaging to go with your product. And it all depends on your distribution model, your branding, your customer experience, and what you want that to look like. So I hope this helps answer any questions about packaging and how, how it works and, and what your process might look like in getting packaging done for your product. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed. And like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in the description. And of course, we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you. Thank you.