Please note readers, this does not just apply to candle boxes. This applies to any cosmetic, soap, tea, gourmet food or other packaging that may have more than one variant (eg. fragrance or flavour).
It is all too easy to get excited when ordering your first lot of candle boxes. You spent many hours test burning candles and annoying friends with market research questions and forcing them to rank your new candle fragrances.
You have been selling your products successfully at local markets and sold well through a few craft fairs and have been getting great feedback. Some local gift shops have even also expressed interest in selling your candles. However they say they are really great candles, BUT it would be better if they have boxes as most people buy these type of things as a gift for someone else. Or you just want to make your candles and products look more premium and professional.
What to do? Start searching online for candle box packaging of course.
However when you request your quotation from your friendly packaging company, you fall over backwards when you receive the quote. Suddenly the minimum quantities and the total cost quoted make you think twice. Five fragrances with a minimum of 1000 pieces per fragrance. That is 5,000 pieces and a whole lot of money. Suddenly thinking to yourself, how many weekends at the market do I have to do to go through all of these?
Now also considering that an average shipping carton holds about 500 candle boxes, which is suddenly ten cartons you need to find space for in your back room along with everything else you have stored for your business.
Then, if you were like me and also want to introduce a seasonal fragrance for Mother’s Day or Christmas, or just want to use up that left over fragrance and give it a cool name, that adds even more dollars and space to the equation.
How do you know which fragrance will sell more than others. What happens if you run out of that box first?
Is there a solution? Yes. There is a smart way to start out and minimise costs, space and also give you flexibility in adding or changing fragrances. Packaging printing companies will not normally suggest this to you, because it is usually about maximising sales and efficiency of production for them.
Here is the secret.... Start off with one well designed generic candle box. When you design this box, include the same text that would be on every different candle fragrance box including candle safety and burning information, your company and brand story and logo in the artwork. You can even add a bit of flash by gold hot foil stamping part of your design.
While designing this, think carefully about leaving a space maybe on the front or on the front leading edge and top where a label can be applied in a key fragrance colour or even just a clear label with the fragrance name. Design it so that when the label is applied, the colour and art of the label complements the box, so it looks like it belongs there.
How does this save money you ask?
We can supply as low as 500 pieces of a box (but 1000 will not cost you much more). This will be your generic box.
Then if you purchase for example 50 or 100 of each fragrance label, you can pick and manufacturer what you like each time and keep using the generic box. It is quicker and more economical to just get 50-100 more labels of a new fragrance or restock if you run out.
Another idea to save a little more and make it easier to keep track of your labels is to make sure when you design the label, the same fragrance label can be used on the generic candle box and also on the candle jar or glass front. The more labels you order the same size, the cheaper they become.
The result is you can just start out with 500 or 1000 generic candle boxes and combine with 50 labels of each fragrance and be in business.
I used this technique in the past for contract manufacturing clients to minimise their costs and have customers use this method with great success.
We also can these short run labels. They come on practical sheets or as single pieces and are easy to apply and easily removable which is handy if you need a second go to apply just that little bit straighter without leaving any sticky glue.
If you want to talk more about this, feel free to contact me.