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Protect your brand, product or invention from the hazards of consumer product launching and go from idea to product to big brand with guidance from retail product design and development experts Tracy and Tom Hazard. Get the insider secrets to put the right things in the right order with the right resources so you can out design, outsource and out profit your way to retail success.

Hey product launchers, Tom Hazard here on another great session of Product Launch Hazards. And today, we've got one of our rather new experts on the platform, Purva Batra from Flexible Pouches. And he's been on once before. Tracy had him on and they had a good general session to get you acquainted with our new expert here. And today, he's going to take us on a little different journey, talking about a few things from his personal business experience, not only about packaging, which is an area that a lot of you would be interested in, but also potentially some other general entrepreneurial and business related subjects. So thank you for joining us again today.

Thanks for having me, Tom. So for those of you who don't know me, my name is Aparva Bhatra. I am the founder and CEO of Flexible Pouches. We are a company that aims to sort of level the playing field for entrepreneurs and small businesses, you know, level the playing field with big boys really because product packaging is one of those things that really makes or breaks your product here. And so, you know, historically, custom branded packaging, fully printed, custom branded, customized packaging was sort of afforded only to the larger players. And so, you know, what Flexible Pouches aims to do is sort of empower those entrepreneurs and small business owners so that they can compeTe at the retail shelves because at the end of the day, that's where consumers interact with their brand and that's their first interaction with your product. You can have the best product in the world, but if the competitor packages it better, it doesn't mean anything at the end of the day. That's where we come from. Flexible packages about us, in order to help out the smaller companies and entrepreneurs, we have the lowest minimums in the industry. the fastest turnarounds for custom printed flexible packaging. And so we work with brands such as Trader Joe's, General Mills, all the way to Mom and Pops here. And so a couple of examples of some of the stuff that we've got here is some stuff you might find at Trader Joe's or basically you can go to any national major grocery store in the country and find a product where the packaging has been designed and produced by us. I started on this journey a few years ago here. I've got an engineering background. I worked a job in mechanical engineering in the oil and gas industry. And so sort of did a transition 180 and just sort of went cold into the entrepreneurial world here. And so, you know, fell into flexible packaging and I learned a great deal. And going back just a few years, I mean, packaging is one of those things where I feel that entrepreneurs, when they start off, when they've got that brand new idea, they will, you know, they're very enthusiastic about it and they're very into it. And sometimes that enthusiasm can unfortunately blind them in terms of, you know, what they actually need to do from a business standpoint to ensure that they can reach the sales that they actually need to get, right? And so I started on this and then we reverse engineered the problem sort of, right? And so we said, All right, well what makes a new product sort of sell at the retail shelves? And we looked through all these studies that said consumers spend an average of seven seconds at the retail store shelf. And again, since we're mostly doing flexible packaging, we're primarily in the food industry, but we're doing everything from pharmaceuticals to farm marijuana to cannabis, you name it here. And so customers go to the retail store shelves and they spend seven seconds before they make a decision. And there's so many competing products here. And so we realized that brand awareness is one of the single biggest keys in terms of actually establishing yourself as a product, establishing a new product especially, and doing well on that. And so a surprising number of companies, particularly small and growing businesses, struggle with the relationship between effective product packaging and long-term viability of that product and subsequently the brand. And most of the time, we found that the relationship between this product packaging and how well it does It affects businesses of all sizes, but it's because a disproportionate amount of resources are dedicated to new product perfection. And so, under the false pretense that if my product is perfect, it will sell without any effort, or it will sell, maybe not any effort, but it will sell. And you look at historically across business, that isn't always the case, obviously. And so, it's a combination of various things. Not discounting the importance of effective, you know, having effective or excellent product, but because without the product, obviously there's no value proposition, but the two sides to the branding equation include the perfect product as well as being able to get the customer's attention. And so that's where product packaging comes into play. And then the second reason I think a lot of entrepreneurs fail to realize or, you know, give enough importance to the product packaging is failure to recognize how stiff the competition is, right? This is particularly true in markets where quality rating is undeniably more subjective, such as food. And so when a consumer goes to the retail shelf and they've got dozens of options to choose from, you've got to realize that a lot of the competitors out there, they may not be spending all the resources necessarily to perfect their product. They may be spending a disproportionate amount on alluring the customer to their product so that their product wins a sale. It's sort of a game there. And so finally, I think the bigger picture in terms of packaging, it's an entire customer experience. And so entrepreneurs need to realize when they are designing a new product, when they're launching a new brand especially, there should be a focus on the entire consumer experience. And that includes, you know, obviously the unboxing experience, the opening experience, but also throughout the life of the product, right? And so it doesn't matter what the product is. If your packaging breaks, on your way home from the store or in transit from Amazon to you, the consumers are significantly less likely to have a positive experience with that brand and therefore it's a big red flag there. And so oftentimes the brands themselves haven't built an identity or a loyal customer base. And so because of that, I think that for the small companies maintaining a focus on that customer experience becomes even more important. And so again, we started this off and we've been working since 2014 on flexible packaging here. And so we work with a number of companies out there. And so looking back on it, I myself went through some of the same struggles that every entrepreneur sort of has. And so starting off, we were chasing some of these bigger customers, some of these more established brands that may not be the General Mills of, the landscape, but maybe the mid-sized brands. And so that's how we initially started getting our initial client base. And so I realize one of the most important things to kind of focus on when you're starting a new business is think long term, right? Being able to get a sale here, being able to win a contract there without regard for the longer term viability of the business. Or how does that play into your longer term business plan? How does that play into scalability, which is something I'll get to in a minute, is something that when you do start to grow, when you do start to do well down the line, you'll realize that, oh, wow, this isn't really synced up or there's a lot of inconsistency, there's a lot of confusion, if you will, in terms of organization, right? And so once you get traction on a new business, once you've got your packaging design, once you've got everything kind of ready to go, the growth phase of it, you know, they say starting a business is one of the hardest things. True, but I've come to learn that even harder is the scaling part, the second step. And so scalability. We started off in 2014 and now here we are, we do three to four million units a month in terms of flexible pouches, stand-up pouches, three side seal bags, bottom gusseted bags, side gusseted bags. And so what actually got us there was the ability to scale. And so how we did that was sort of standardization of processes, right? And so there's nothing necessarily unique about going out there and buying a flexible pouch, right? You know, there's suppliers or dime a dozen, but we kind of focused again from our standpoint on the customer experience there. And so keeping those minimums to a low, ensuring some of the faster lead times, and then also making sure things are sort of standardized, right? So customers like standardized things. They like things they can recognize. And so in order to kind of do that, we had to sort of consolidate. We've got the standard size table that we kind of use for a lot of our custom print jobs, but then at the end of the day, we also have the capability to run everything custom, right? So that allows a little bit of consistency within our business. Secondly, we're in a growing phase now, and we learned that customers want sort of an instant online experience as well. And so one of the big pitfalls, especially in our industry, is There's a longer sales cycle in terms of if you're out there trying to order some pouches, some packaging, and you have to email somebody, and then you have to wait a few days for a quote, and then you have to get back, back and forth. And so that ends up taking up a lot more time rather than being able to sort of go online, pick from something standard, select your options, go in, and then buy the product. Right. And so place your order. And so that's sort sort of experience that we focused on. And so keeping in mind the customer experience will go a very long way in your business regardless of what you're doing here. And so that's what gets us to being able to go from starting a business, getting those initial clients, and then scaling to being a large company. Item number three, I guess you realize is that at a certain point when you grow, there's actually a sweet spot in terms of growth as well. There is a thing as growing too fast being able to actually handle a lot of that business. Right? And so that if you're playing your cards right, if things are working out right, that when that happens, it sort of creeps up on you. It sort of happens faster than you think and then you realize, oh crap, I were behind on tasks A, B, and C or standardizing this procedure or making sure that we have more of a robust process for invoicing and making sure everything is sort of up to date. And so getting started on those tasks up front in terms of standardizing your process, standardizing your procedures and making sure the internals are in check, also pretty important. And so again, generally speaking, I think that product packaging, customer experience, and focus on congruency, consistency, and organization are the key principles in order to kind of step up and grow a business from ground up and scale. It's a little bit about us actually. So like I said, we started off with some of those larger companies. We're based out of Houston, Texas. We have a distribution center in Houston and one of the things that makes it sort of unique is that a lot of companies that want just-in-time packaging deliveries, custom producing packaging, whether it's flexible packaging, whether it's box packaging, whatever you're doing, custom producing anything really, there is a certain lead time associated with that. And so we have sort of a unique business model by which we will produce a certain batch, keep that in our inventory, and then allow customers to draw from it when it drops to a certain level. put another batch into production. And so again, all part of the customer experience. So flexible packaging, I guess some of you guys out there may be pretty interested in, you know, sort of learning about the actual technicals in terms of packaging, what's, you know, involved. And so there's a lot of nomenclature out there. There's a lot of terminology that can be pretty confusing. And so I'll start with some of the basics there. There are two primary types of prints for, you know, custom printed bags, such as this, right? These are flexible pouches, stand-up pouches, three side seal bags. The number one is the offset printing. So that is your rotogravure or your flexographic printing. These types of printings require printing plates or cylinders. And so that is, you know, sort of historically the, you know, what the packaging industry has been. And that's one of the reasons why the minimums have been so high, just because these are, you know, much larger presses. These are, machines that require a certain web rewind. So you're talking minimums of 10,000 plus on offset printing. And it is however cost effective, right? So if you are at the level where you're doing 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, you do want to go with an offset printing style just because that's what gets your cost down, your unit costs down. And a lot of our medium to large size clients, that's the technology we use to print their stuff. In the last two to three years, another technology called digital printing has come about and it's been around for several years, but only in the last three to four years has it really taken off. And so digital printing is for very small runs, runs as small as 1,000 units. And so that's where we kind of cater to those really small mom and pops, entrepreneurs that are just starting off, just getting kind of a lay of the land. And so digital printing is a much faster turnaround. There's no printing plates, no printing cylinders. It's basically, imagine a color laser printer for your computer, just industrial size souped up for being able to print on flexible films. And so we're noticing a significant traction in that. There was a statistic that 2013, 99% of all the packaging in the world, flexible packaging in the world, was printed with offset, only about 1%. That number has fallen about 93 or 94%. So that six-fold increase in the last few years, and we project that trend to only increase. Again, a lot of that will cater only to these smaller run smaller companies, mom and pops, when you get to a certain point that will transition over to the offset flexographic or rotogravure printing. Other thing I wanted to talk about was in terms of the film usage here. And so a lot of companies, depending on what they're packaging, they will come to us and say, can you give us a recommendation as far as what materials do we need? And so materials that are used in flexible film-based bags, generally there are a couple standardized materials. but primarily there are polyester, polyethylene and metalized films, right? And so these are your three primary film types to kind of play with, if you will. And so a lot of people will confuse foil for metalized film. So there's, you know, there's metalized film, which is literally it's a sheet of plastic with a vacuum deposit of metal on it. And to the un-discerning eye, it looks just like aluminum foil. but it's really not. And so depending on what your shelf life requirements are, you know, we can kind of guide you and help you out with that. But generally speaking, we will print your artwork onto the outer layer. It's a reverse print, which means it's on the inside of the first layer. That's generally a polyester or a polypropylene film. Then that is laminated onto a metalized film, if that's what it calls for, metalized film or aluminum. Or, and then on the inside, there will always be a polyethylene there. That's the heat seal there. so when you pack up your product, you fill it up, the top is heat sealable, you run it through a heat seal and the polyethylene on there will bond to the other side and will be a perfect seal. And so these are really just the two or three primary standardized materials that are used. We do have the capability to custom run basically, you know, if you need a certain thickness for your overall bag, if you have certain shelf life requirements that call for an aluminum foil, maybe you don't need foil, maybe you have, you know, slightly more stringent shelf life requirements. We put a metalized film in there. And so based on that, that's sort of the film structure that we'll put into place. But everything is first printed, then laminated, and then formed into the pallets that you see here. Finally, I guess, if anybody's got any questions, feel free to shoot me an email. The website is www.flexiblepouches.com. You can email me directly at My first name, A-P-U-R-V-A@flexiblepouches.com Again, we're here to kind of help new brands out, even if, you know, flexible packaging is not your mode or style of packaging that you need, we can at least kind of guide you guys through some of the ins and outs of what goes into new product packaging design and considerations for actually having a successful product at the end of the day.

Well, you know, I think that's fascinating packaging. And I guess I do have a question I'd like to ask. Contribute here, which is I think the service that you're offering not only for food packaging, but even as you said at the end there, packaging in general for brands. I think this is really an underrated aspect of your brand representation to the world. I mean, especially as an Amazon seller or a private labeler of some kind, you know, to the world, this packaging is going to appear like you manufacture the product that you're selling, right?

That's right.

Brand is such a critical component of this. It's probably, I think, one of the most important assets of a growing company. Would you agree?

I think that's the number one most critical ingredient. Before even you talk about your packaging, before you talk about designing a product even, you want to make sure that the branding is there and that goes in line with what I was talking about. consumer experience, right? When you, you yourself can kind of, you know, recognize your favorite brands in any category, you know, it doesn't have to be food, you know, anything you go to the store, you kind of resonate or, and a lot of times, you know, when you look at it psychologically, you're really connecting with the logos, the color, you know, sort of the brand that that company has established, right? And so people really underestimate the value of that, right? And people underestimate the value of once you have that, you know, you, you have the capability to, really take your business to the next level. And so, yeah, fully agree on that. Yeah.

And I think especially if your goal is to grow your brand to a point until you can get it acquired by somebody, that brand value is gonna be a multiplier of whatever the real value of your company might be.

Correct. Yeah.

I remember this is earlier in my career. I was in Michigan at the time and Gerber Baby Products was there. And I forget who bought them or the company I was talking to sold it, I think, to a Swiss company. And I know this is an extreme example because it's a huge company, but they had estimated they got an extra $1 billion above the real value for the product lines they were selling because of the value of that brand of.

The big value of the brand, basically. Right. And that's, that's what it is at the end of the day. The last time I was on here talking with Tracy, I think she referenced an article she wrote, which was about, you know, million dollar companies don't buy 9.99 logos or something like that. Right. Yeah. That, that really, yeah. There's really value in that idea, really. Right. And so when you're starting off, right, cutting corners is you don't want to cut corners when it comes to establishing your brand identity when it comes establishing yourself because that people don't realize how, what that will actually transform into if you actually do work on your business and, you know, grow to a certain level, because that's what customers will experience. And so that's not something to be taken lightly. Yeah.

And so related to that, is there anything that you've seen a lot of companies make that you would call sort of a rookie error, a common early mistake with regard to their brand?

Yeah, I definitely think, you know, so we, we used to have one side of our, our business, which we're phasing out of now just because we don't think it's in line with entrepreneurs which is do unprinted packaging as well. So we've got stock size bags of, you know, this is an example here, for generic packaging, unprinted bags. And, you know, we've got those at a warehouse, you can order them online. One of the things we saw, a big pitfall for customers was that, you know, a lot of times they would cut corners and say, oh, well, I don't have time to design an entire bag. I don't have time to get artwork. I don't have time to do all that. Or maybe, oh, you know, I don't want to spend the money up front for too many bags, we'll get a case of 500, we'll tack on some labels and we'll go from there. And I think that is really kind of shooting yourself in the foot to start with, right? I mean, maybe for samples at a trade show, that's primarily what we advocated for at this point. That's the way to go. But at the end of the day, I mean, if you are looking to get into a major big box distributor, retailer, you don't want off the shelf packaging. You don't want off the stuff with, you know, just your sticker on it, right? Especially if that's going to be your image on the store shelf. And so, We've had a lot of customers that come to us that are maybe a little bit on the smaller side that will say, oh, should we go with the digital print route? Remember a few years ago that wasn't even really a thing and now it's really blown up. I would say that's about half our business now. And so it's really allowed customers to get up there and really compete with the brands and the likes of Gerber at the end of the day. And so when we see customers approach us and say, ah, you know, well we'll just get a case of 500, it'll ship out the same day and we'll have it next week. print some labels and go on there. We find, not surprisingly, that many times those are the brands that aren't coming back at the end of the day for larger custom printer because that kills your brand right there, in our opinion.

I think that makes sense. I think those are words to the wise. If you think you can't afford to create the right brand, you may be right. You can't afford it because you're not going to be in business much longer.

Right, exactly. Yeah.

They say if you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. It's the mindset, right?

Correct, exactly right. Both both are right, yeah. That's the one who thinks he can and can't, they're both right. And so, one more thing I did want to touch on real quick on the flexible packaging here is that, you know, as an example, when you go out there, you know, I'm mentioning these plastic films, polyfilms that are used in the construction here, you know, polyethylene, right? It's a heat sealer, like I said, I don't want people to go out there and think that this is the same kind of plastic that's in your grocery store bag, right? You go to Walmart or you go to, you know, a grocery store, you come back with a plastic bag. that's also low density polyethylene, technically the same polymer that's used on the heat seal layer. The difference here with flexible pouches, and a lot of folks may know this, but these are engineered barrier films. So these are films necessarily that are something we call biaxially oriented. So basically sheets of film that are oriented and that are stretched in both directions, the horizontal direction and transverse and the machine direction is what it's called. And what that does is A, it gives it very strong mechanical properties so that you don't have issues such as breakage or tearing, tearing while your product is in there or while you're shipping it. And then more importantly, it gives it the barrier properties. That is the single most governing thing, at least for food, but also other things as well, right? I mean, a lot of products out there, depending on what materials are used to construct the product, as an example, copper or steel, whatever, plastic. You know, if you have a certain oxygen transmission rate through your packaging over time, depending on how long it's sitting on the shelf, right, things can start to kind of go bad in there, right? Obviously, that's, you know, food is significantly more sensitive to that. And so it applies to that a little bit more. But, you know, these films are designed with very specific barrier transmission characteristics in terms of limiting the amount of oxygen that can go in, limiting the amount of moisture. And, you know, these are technical values that we publish on our website. And, yeah, you can go and look those up. And, you know, there's an entire science behind packaging, right? And so it gets into deep. And so the point is, it's not just, you know, typical, you know, plastic that you'll see in a grocery store bag or anywhere else. These are barrier films that are used to actually construct these bags.

I'm glad you brought that up, because that was something I was gonna make sure to let our audience know is that it is a highly technical field, packaging and all the food requirements and all of the, different properties of different materials. But the good thing is if you're, you know, watching this and you have a product or a food item that you need to come up with packaging for, guess what? You do not need to become an expert in packaging because you have an expert here who knows all that. His team, his company knows these things. And so you can seek the help of an expert and just to come to a purva with, here's the product that we want to sell. Exactly. And that's what we have a lot of. Yeah, we have a lot of customers.

That say, you know, this is, this is my startup idea. This is, you know, this is what we're packaging. We've got the product kind of perfected down. We've done our, in the case of food. And I keep talking about food because that's, that is a good chunk of our business. Although we're doing stuff like hygiene products, Pharmaceuticals, other consumer. We were working on a project with oral B actually doing some mouse cards, right? And so, scope is unlimited, but they come to us and say, this is our product, this is what we've got, we've got all the business side of the product development under the wraps, but how do I package it? What do I need, right? And so we'll give you guys some reading material if you so choose, if you want to go through it. But the goal is not for every brand owner to become an expert on technical product packaging. You guys have a business to run. The goal is to kind of let us help you guys out, you know, hold your hand and walk you through the process, advise you, answer any questions you may have in terms of why we're, you know, suggesting what we're suggesting, but then kind of taking charge from there. So that's kind of the idea.

That makes perfect sense. So that's what I would do, product launchers. I would, I don't have the time to become an expert in packaging. If anything, I would just find in the market Certain qualities of packaging that I like maybe or that speak to me in terms of, like you said, user experience, right? There's a feel to it. There's a certain quality there and a user experience, but ultimately the requirements for the product that you want to sell will dictate a lot of what the material should be. But above all else, the brand is critical, can't emphasize that enough. and if you haven't figured out your brand, that's probably the number one thing. You know, when you were mentioning about the stock packaging that you're getting out of, I actually respect that you're getting out of that, that, you know, you're.

Probably losing a little. Yeah. Yeah.

Per year. But I think I've seen people doing things like that, mostly like the local farmers market or something.

Right.

I mean, if you're at that level, maybe that's what you need.

Yeah. I mean, there is maybe a market for it at a trade show or a local farmers market or, you know, packaging home goods. Right. And so. The goal is, for our, this is our branding because we're doing the same thing. We're also a small growing company. We want to make sure that since we're catering to some of the small businesses, we don't want to give the message off that this is what we're recommending. Maybe it was appropriate a few years ago when that was the better alternative, but there are even better alternatives now to get your brand out there. In part, that's the reason. That is a chunk of lost revenue we think will make it up in other ways. At the end of the day, the goal is to make sure we're out there helping brands realize their true potential through effective packaging.

Well, that's fantastic right there. And the other reality probably is how much time and energy do your employees have to spend dealing with those very small orders from an overhead and a profitability and efficiency standpoint. It probably is not the business you want to be in, right?

Right, exactly. Right. And we're in the custom producing business, the custom manufacturing business. we've kind of standardized that like I was talking about earlier. And so that's kind of our route forward and how we plan to grow. Another point to kind of bring up, and this is important, flexible packaging is making wins, right? You go to the store, you see soup these days packaged in flexible bags, whereas it was all exclusively in cans before, right? That being said, flexible packaging may not be the most appropriate form for everybody, right? There's a huge class of products and of course outside of food, but even in food, a can or a rigid or a glass, a certain other type of packaging style is more appropriate. And that's sort of a consideration that you want to have as well when you're looking at it. However, the trends, if you look at the numbers, there is an undeniable trend in the rigid to flexible packaging transition and how brands are kind of going with that. And so there's reasons for it and there's pros and cons. And some of the pros, obviously, we would list include the efficient volume and weight considerations. We've got a page on our website that kind of just has a rough comparison if you guys are, if both will work and hey, which way do we go? It talks about how when you are, for example, buying empty packaging to transport to your co-packer or wherever you're filling your product, an empty standard pouch flattened and it's transported, you will have 30 times significantly less volume utilization to transport that than you would glass jars. So just kind of stuff like that. considerations, saving costs, saving the environment and so forth, increased branding, you have more real estate for basically putting your brand on there. You typically find foldable printed bags that have edge-to-edge print and so it's sort of an opportunity. And so these are all things you want to keep into consideration, not just if you're getting a flexible pouch or if you're doing just in general, when you are going back to designing that brand identity to have a fantastic consumer experience. you want to be able to understand what are your limitations, basically, depending on what you go with.

Wow. Fantastic. Well, Aparva, I can't thank you enough for coming on again today and sharing your wisdom with our audience. And I'm sure that, you know, a lot of people listening to or watching this episode will be reaching out, as they should, for their, not only their packaging needs, but I think also for, you know, even some of the other things that you, you've offered as well, and So thank you so much. I learned something today and that's great too. So, well, we'll look forward to having you again on a future session here of Product Launch Hazards for now. Thanks everyone for listening. We'll talk to you next time. Thank you for joining us on this.

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