Now that unboxing videos have been their own legitimate YouTube genre for a while, packaging is more important than ever for hardware products. We invited Lime Lab’s Graham Hough and PCH’s Josa Leung to talk to Cohort Nine about the types, nuances, and practical concerns of packaging from prototype to execution. After their in-depth lecture, we had a few questions for them.
HWY1: Packaging has a lot of jobs to do; how do you decide for any one product what its most important job is?
GH: That’s easy. Its first, most important job is actually its last: did you receive the product undamaged and in working order? I don’t have a choice about that; if I don’t do that, it doesn’t matter what else the packaging does.
JL: The basic requirement of packaging is that the product be protected, but to me it’s really about extending your brand. You want to align your customers’ touchpoints from your website to product to packaging — it’s a must. A website’s just a website, a visual experience. Packaging is something physical: touch and smell are involved. If your brand is simple and elegant, but your packaging is nasty, cheap, and heavy, that’s no good.
GH: That’s something you want control over, but at the same time, if you tell me the customer should receive something utterly pristine including the packaging, I’m going to have to make a box for your box.
HWY1: What’s the killer mistake that’s most often made when companies come to you asking how to design their packaging?
JL: Asking why it’s so expensive!
GH: Addressing your packaging too late. I talked about this in the presentation: if you’re telling me you’re not wasting your time when you’re making a sketch of your product, but I’d be wasting mine by making a concurrent sketch of the packaging, that’s wrong. You’re doing something that you definitely can’t avoid; you can’t say there won’t be packaging. So when you’re drawing something that’s going to be packaged, I should be involved at that stage, too. Another reason not bringing packaging into your entire program early enough is a big mistake is that cost becomes a giant surprise to you.
JL: I get questions like “Why are you complicating things? You need three months to make a box?” It’s about educating our customers, though this only tends to happen in some startups — bigger companies understand it better.
GH: It’s not just that packaging is the last thing they think of, it’s also diminished. No matter how much they want to put into the packaging, it eventually comes down to “It’s just a box, why does it cost so much?”
JL: Sometimes they come to me asking if I can take a design and cost it down. That’s a stupid question; instead of costing down a package, you could save money by slightly tweaking its palletization.
GH: I think what Josa’s also saying is that if you want me to cost a particular package design down, the moment I start to do that, it’s no longer that design. If I change part of the box into a new material or alter a way of doing it, it becomes something different, and you’ll say “Well, I didn’t want that.” Of course you didn’t; it’s not the same thing.
JL: If you want to save on cost, do something that doesn’t impact your consumer; do something invisible. You can sometimes earn a lot through careful strategy, and use your savings to make something expensive. GoPro is a perfect example: they spend less overall but still do very premium packaging.
HWY1: There must be different concerns a B2B company would have with their packaging; what are they thinking about?
JL: It depends on what the last B is; it could be a retail space or pure manufacturing, both of which are very different stories. We do packaging for Disneyland’s MagicBands; those ship from China to Disneylands all over the world and their hotels. One hotel can use up a couple thousand of these bands in a night; how should I design the packaging? One big box to put 2000 bands inside isn’t efficient. You have to consider the hotel and how they use them: they put them in their guests’ rooms when they check in, so there’s an open-box experience and process.
I once did a packaging design for a smart lock that the company ships to their partners in big hotels. Every room has to install one lock, and each hotel has 300 doors; how do we ship these 300 sets? We designed an individual shipper, because the master who installs the lock still has to follow a process, which means there’s still an open-box experience.
GH: In most marketplaces, our customers have to concern themselves with multiple channels. Josa showed an example in our talk of the scoping doc we give people; it includes questions like “Does it need to hang?” If you say yes, I know it’s going into a retail environment. If I ask whether you do B2B and you say yes, I know you have both needs. Should we have two packages, or does one serve both channels? Shipping-in-container is often used for B2C because it’s a way to get out of the higher-cost printing. When you do that, you add a whole process, so if it’s a small part of the business, maybe you should just put the retail box in a box and call it good for your B2C needs because you don’t have enough volume. Back in the day B2B was just called “bulk;” you knew they were going to repack it on their end.
