Packaging is a very important part of product design,in fact, packaging design is a marketing tool in its own right.The way that the product is presented to potential customers on the shelf can easily be the difference between making a sale or not to a potential customer. Although packaging is important, it also quickly becomes expensive. Modern manufacturing techniques are more flexible and affordable than they used to be. As a result of modern manufacturing capabilities, a number of companies have come up with some highly innovative ways of packaging their products.
Reducing packaging costs can have a dramatic impact on the feasibility of future projects. Fortunately, reducing these costs is relatively simple if you know how to approach it. The following tips will help you to keep the costs of producing your packaging, and therefore of transporting your product, as low as possible with the minimum amount of hassle.
Make it Lighter
Making packaging lighter might sound like a minor thing, but it actually has a number of advantages. For one thing, transporting lighter cargo is cheaper. When potential customers see your product on store shelves then they will likely pick it up to look at it if they are interested in buying it. A product that is lighter is easy to hold for longer, the longer a customer holds an item, the more likely they are to ultimately buy it.
Make it Smaller
The smaller the packaging for a product is, the more of them you can fit on a store shelf, and in the back of a delivery truck. This will both reduce the costs of transporting your product and allow it to be displayed more prominently within stores. Smaller packaging also requires less material and every millimeter of packaging material that you save represents potentially millions of dollars in savings.
As well as the practical advantages of smaller packaging, many designers find that having a more limited canvas to work with forces them to work more efficiently. Removing irrelevant images and text, while making the ones that remain more prominent, will leave you with packaging that is more attractive and informative to the customer.
Automate
By automating as much of the process of actually producing the packaging and inserting the product (if they both happen at the same location), you can save a significant amount of time and money. Think of the difference between a regular restaurant and a fast food joint.In the regular restaurant the food is prepared by hand and each chef can only cook so many dishes at a time. By contrast, the fast food restaurant adopts an assembly line approach to produce a large volume of consistent packaging.There are a variety of machines, such as tray packers and case packers, which can be used to automate the packaging process.
Reducing the costs of packaging, even in the most seemingly small and insignificant way, can save your business a significant amount of money. Packaging is an important part of the process of delivering a product to a customer and it has a role to play in every stage of that process. From the transport and transit of the product, to its display on store shelves, packaging serves a vital purpose.
