Printed Boxes Vs Sticker: Marketing & Brand Management
How you package and present your goods is a critical component of marketing and brand management for all businesses. So here’s an important question to evaluate: should your company be using printed labels (or stickers) for your shipping boxes and product packaging; or, is it better to print directly onto your boxes and package itself using a custom box printing service.
Here we will go over some of the pros and cons of using stickers vs custom printed boxes, as well as offer local price estimates and further assistance for businesses in the Greater Vancouver Area.
Where Custom Box Printing & Packaging Makes Sense
For customer facing cartons and packaging — such as delivery boxes, cake boxes, pizza boxes, packaging, and so on — custom box printing and custom packaging is usually well worth the upfront cost. It provides confidence in your product and your brand, giving them a cohesive, professional, and established appearance.
Conversely, stickers on plain cartons may appear unprofessional and rushed when compared to the colourful, custom printed carton.
That said, if you are a small startup, printed labels on your boxes can work — sometimes they can work quite well in fact!
Where Stickers on Boxes May be a Good Idea
Transparent Labels on Transparent Film: Let’s say you have a bakery startup using bakery boxes with a see through window on top. This style might work fairly well aesthetically. One could print labels on transparent stickers and maintain a functional yet clean aesthetic.
Trendy Startup Aesthetic: Another way where stickers might work is if you build your marking and image around to embrace it. Take Earnest Ice Cream on Fraser Street in Vancouver for example. Their use of printed labels on plain brown cardboard builds into their brand recognition in powerful ways. Compared to the home-printed labels of many low-budget startups, Earnest gets it done right!
Scaling, Where Stickers on Boxes Doesn’t Work
In-house printing doesn’t scale very easily. This is why printing companies still exist. When scaling operations up, the cost of labels, ink or toner, and the labor to operate the printer and physically apply the labels all adds up in cost, time, space, equipment, and effort.
If you plan to do it all in-house, be sure that printing 50 box labels per month is a whole different game than printing 15,000 box labels a month.
As such, for most companies, printing labels yourself should only be a temporary solution or used in low volume circumstances.
Return on Investment
This is where a box printing service has immediate return on investment. Industrial sized box manufacturers and box printers like Racer Boxes operate in economies of scale. And because we purchase our supplies at such high volume, we are able to pass the savings to our customers.
Vancouver’s Custom Cardboard Box Printer
If you are in the Greater Vancouver Area and want to evaluate whether custom box printing is right for your company, call Racer Boxes at 604-270-8205 or contact us online anytime.
