The impetus on customer experience is driving more and more companies to review branding their packaging materials. It’s often a great opportunity to market your brand and use your packaging material as an extension of marketing. The competitive landscape of ecommerce is one arena where branded packaging material is becoming a real difference maker. It’s helping create brand loyalty and enhancing the perception of quality and concern for the customer.

Here are some basic guidelines to printing your logo on your shipping carton:

• Depending on the size of the carton and quantity purchased you usually have a very minimal upcharge to print your logo on 2 opposing panels of the shipping carton. This is especially true if you can use a one color logo. Pricing increases as you increase the number of colors required. Most transit packaging print, not retail, is one color. Printing on a white carton can increase the appeal of your brand and is usually slightly less than a 10% upcharge versus standard brown cartons.
• While the per carton price for printing versus nonprinting can be similar there is an upfront investment in printing plates. These can range from $300 to thousands of dollars. The size of the print and carton dictate the cost of the printing plate. One approach to help minimize this upfront cost is to share plates among the various carton sizes. For example, use the same size print and plate for cartons within a similar size range. Changes to artwork unfortunately usually mean new print plates.

Printing your logo on your tape:

• Printing your logo on your tape has a lower entry costs than printing your logo on your cartons. You still have some upfront costs for your custom artwork, but they are minimal in comparison or around $100. The cost of the tape could be as much as double the cost of standard carton tape which sounds much worse than reality. If your carton is $.50 then you might be spending $.02 on the tape. Increasing your tape costs to $.04 for printed tape might be the better solution versus the expense of several carton printing plates. Especially when you have a multitude of carton sizes and would need lots of carton printing plates.
• Using a one-color tape logo is also the lowest cost option and the most common printed tapes are one color.



Branding your packaging:

• Although it’s the least common of the three options it’s becoming more prevalent as another way to put your brand in front of your customer. The key element of branded packaging materials are usually higher order minimums. Since the materials are typically standard and manufactured in high volumes, most manufacturers want similar high volumes for the custom printed production. There are fairly low minimums for printing bubble mailers but it’s still usually 10,000 quantities. Depending on the type of material it could be an upcharge of 30% -50% to custom print or have custom colors.