Product Packaging for Retail Stores
February 15, 2020 8:39 AM Subscribe
I have a product that I have invented and have a patent pending on. I am having a website for online sales developed. I also need to think about brick and mortar retail, particularly package design. The thing is plastic and measures 1 3/4"l x 1"w x 1 1/4"h (a rectangular cuboid, more or less).
Are there specifications by the brick & mortar industry for packaging?
Things I want to consider:
- minimize ecological impact
- theft
I'm just getting started with this and so probably have questions that I don't even know yet.
Any advice or guidance is appreciated.
Under the direction of a patent attorney, I should not yet make public the thing. I can say that it would mostly liked by stocked by music stores.
Things I want to consider:
- minimize ecological impact
- theft
I'm just getting started with this and so probably have questions that I don't even know yet.
Any advice or guidance is appreciated.
Under the direction of a patent attorney, I should not yet make public the thing. I can say that it would mostly liked by stocked by music stores.
I worked for a company that did packaging design for companies that were trying to focus more towards online sales (which, in many cases was a rapidly increasing, and shifting exclusively towards). There are not industry-wide specifications for packaging. However, larger box store retailers (places like, REI, Wallmart, Target) will often have their own specifications for retail packaging, none of which line up with each other. Walmart typically focuses on space, REI focuses on minimalist packaging...they're all different. Higher compliance with those standards can result in better store placement (and some places straight won't carry your product if it doesn't adhere to those specs; REI is surprisingly shitty about this, despite their heart being in a good place). This resulted in some crazy-pants packaging solutions, involving six different packaging types for a single product. Buh-nanas. It sounds like your product will be sold in one type of brick and mortar, and I don't have any direct experience with it, but if there's one or two big players your sales will flow through, you might want to engage with them directly. If they're independent shops, I would just consider how the item will be displayed, and roll in the lowest-impact direction that will let you go.
E-commerce is another real concern when designing packaging. Conforming products to amazon standards is very common; they give storage price breaks for size of packaging, and charge more for products that have lots of dead space inside. Having a package that's 'amazon ready' can be very valuable, but can often contradict the desires of retail establishments. It really depends on exactly where you plan on selling more of these items. The place that I worked at had a pretty fancy in depth calculator for figuring out where the point was when it was worth having 'e-commerce' packaging and 'brick-and-mortar' packaging, but really, it was around the 15% slice in either direction.
Very minor differences in packaging can mean a significant reduction in amazon fees (which is where most ecommerce product action happens for the brands we worked with). For example, one redesign we did was for a knife company. They had their products in blister packs that were more for retail level products. this was not the knife, but they looked like this packaging. We weren't able to minimize the packaging size to conform to the smallest dimensions of the knife (folded in), but were able to make a package design that allowed Amazon robots to pull the package from storage instead of humans, resulting in a drastic decrease in storage costs there. The cheapest, most ecologically friendly material we could use was just corrugated brown boxing, but had a designer do some lovely work on the outside. It' was a nice little package that was 100% shipping compliant, meaning it didn't necessarily need a large amazon overbox to be shipped (which isn't to say Amazon didn't anyway...buh...).
This kind of stuff is complicated enough that if you're expecting to sell a ton of these little buddies, it would be worth hiring a packaging consultant to at least give you the lay of the land and possibly work in tandem with a designer to come up with something that will work with the broadest sales channel you're planning to use.
I wouldn't worry about theft deterrence. Theft isn't your job to worry about, that's the retailer's job. There's not much that packaging can do to directly deter much theft, especially if you're looking at minimizing ecological impact. Exactly zero clients ever asked us to design packaging for theft deterrence, which isn't to say it's not a thing, but I wouldn't expect you to have to worry about this in your packaging design (or, at all).
TL:DR Packaging design can be different for each sales channel you're engaging in, and if one channel makes up around 15% of your sales, you may want to look at making packaging directly for that channel to maximize benefits specific to that channel.
posted by furnace.heart at 9:27 AM on February 15, 2020 [14 favorites]
E-commerce is another real concern when designing packaging. Conforming products to amazon standards is very common; they give storage price breaks for size of packaging, and charge more for products that have lots of dead space inside. Having a package that's 'amazon ready' can be very valuable, but can often contradict the desires of retail establishments. It really depends on exactly where you plan on selling more of these items. The place that I worked at had a pretty fancy in depth calculator for figuring out where the point was when it was worth having 'e-commerce' packaging and 'brick-and-mortar' packaging, but really, it was around the 15% slice in either direction.
Very minor differences in packaging can mean a significant reduction in amazon fees (which is where most ecommerce product action happens for the brands we worked with). For example, one redesign we did was for a knife company. They had their products in blister packs that were more for retail level products. this was not the knife, but they looked like this packaging. We weren't able to minimize the packaging size to conform to the smallest dimensions of the knife (folded in), but were able to make a package design that allowed Amazon robots to pull the package from storage instead of humans, resulting in a drastic decrease in storage costs there. The cheapest, most ecologically friendly material we could use was just corrugated brown boxing, but had a designer do some lovely work on the outside. It' was a nice little package that was 100% shipping compliant, meaning it didn't necessarily need a large amazon overbox to be shipped (which isn't to say Amazon didn't anyway...buh...).
This kind of stuff is complicated enough that if you're expecting to sell a ton of these little buddies, it would be worth hiring a packaging consultant to at least give you the lay of the land and possibly work in tandem with a designer to come up with something that will work with the broadest sales channel you're planning to use.
I wouldn't worry about theft deterrence. Theft isn't your job to worry about, that's the retailer's job. There's not much that packaging can do to directly deter much theft, especially if you're looking at minimizing ecological impact. Exactly zero clients ever asked us to design packaging for theft deterrence, which isn't to say it's not a thing, but I wouldn't expect you to have to worry about this in your packaging design (or, at all).
TL:DR Packaging design can be different for each sales channel you're engaging in, and if one channel makes up around 15% of your sales, you may want to look at making packaging directly for that channel to maximize benefits specific to that channel.
posted by furnace.heart at 9:27 AM on February 15, 2020 [14 favorites]
As a professional musician, I can say “what music stores?” Yeah there are a few left that struggle on, but everyone I know buys almost everything accessory-ish and electronic online (and increasingly even actual instruments). By far the biggest online specialty music retailer is Sweetwater, so you might check with them. From long experience, they’re awesome people.
I had to go into a Guitar Center (tm) for the first time in years just last week, emergency string situation (in a city of half a million without a single independent retailer who might sell the strings I needed). The place was deserted on a bright Tuesday afternoon. The staff seemed listless and disaffected. And the price of strings and a capo was — I kid you not — triple what I’d pay for the same items online.
I left wondering how much longer they could possibly last.
posted by spitbull at 11:40 AM on February 15, 2020 [1 favorite]
I had to go into a Guitar Center (tm) for the first time in years just last week, emergency string situation (in a city of half a million without a single independent retailer who might sell the strings I needed). The place was deserted on a bright Tuesday afternoon. The staff seemed listless and disaffected. And the price of strings and a capo was — I kid you not — triple what I’d pay for the same items online.
I left wondering how much longer they could possibly last.
posted by spitbull at 11:40 AM on February 15, 2020 [1 favorite]
Also I can report that one finds few if any music accessories — at all — in big box retailers. They never have strings. Sometimes you can find strings at a WalMart super center in the south, but never at Target, Fred Meyer, Best Buy, etc.
Point being that if this is an electronic accessory (as your concern about theft and the size of the item suggest), you should consider online sales and shipping the primary retail scenario.
posted by spitbull at 11:48 AM on February 15, 2020
Point being that if this is an electronic accessory (as your concern about theft and the size of the item suggest), you should consider online sales and shipping the primary retail scenario.
posted by spitbull at 11:48 AM on February 15, 2020
Yah, seconding spitbull that by this point Guitar Center is the only brick-and-mortar retailer large enough to weigh in on packaging. Maaaaaybe Sam Ash, who have like 40+ stores around the US. While there are still quite a few independent music stores around, they're all local operations who find space where they can, so I doubt there's much of an "industry standard" to packaging, except insofar as manufacturers figure things like, "We've already got a contract with Company A to produce Box A for Product A, we'll just have them do a minor re-tool to produce slightly different Box B for Product B which is similar."
You just missed the latest one (and I have never gone myself so I can't speak from personal experience) but maybe it's worth spending some money to attend a NAMM (National Association of Music Merchandisers) convention to look around and see what kind of packaging other companies are using. Summer NAMM is in Nashville in July.
- theft
This probably depends a lot on the planned retail price of your device - if it's like, I dunno, a $200 unit then retailers might prefer some kind of embedded magnetic theft deterrent, or in blisterpack so it can be hung on a slatwall locking security hook, but if it's like a $15 piece they might just want the packaging large enough to reduce the ability of someone just stick the thing in a pocket and walk out. In my own music store retail experience (many many years ago) we put small easily-stealable-but-expensive items behind the counter and/or in a lockable glass display case, and that still seems to largely be true in my own occasional wanders around music retailers.
IOW, size & weight & shape for wholesale shipping and delivery considerations and eye-catching marketing design for display and shipping protection of the piece inside are probably far greater considerations for packaging than anti-theft in this context. (Also, just so you're aware, generally speaking brick-and-mortar music stores own the equipment in their inventory - they pay actual money to the manufacturer or a wholesaler (often as a discounted percent off the the suggested retail price) and then it's theirs. So something getting stolen from a store isn't really your problem as the manufacturer, the store doesn't get to go, "Hey somebody walked off with 5 of your products, you owe me 5 new ones for free.")
posted by soundguy99 at 9:43 AM on February 16, 2020
You just missed the latest one (and I have never gone myself so I can't speak from personal experience) but maybe it's worth spending some money to attend a NAMM (National Association of Music Merchandisers) convention to look around and see what kind of packaging other companies are using. Summer NAMM is in Nashville in July.
- theft
This probably depends a lot on the planned retail price of your device - if it's like, I dunno, a $200 unit then retailers might prefer some kind of embedded magnetic theft deterrent, or in blisterpack so it can be hung on a slatwall locking security hook, but if it's like a $15 piece they might just want the packaging large enough to reduce the ability of someone just stick the thing in a pocket and walk out. In my own music store retail experience (many many years ago) we put small easily-stealable-but-expensive items behind the counter and/or in a lockable glass display case, and that still seems to largely be true in my own occasional wanders around music retailers.
IOW, size & weight & shape for wholesale shipping and delivery considerations and eye-catching marketing design for display and shipping protection of the piece inside are probably far greater considerations for packaging than anti-theft in this context. (Also, just so you're aware, generally speaking brick-and-mortar music stores own the equipment in their inventory - they pay actual money to the manufacturer or a wholesaler (often as a discounted percent off the the suggested retail price) and then it's theirs. So something getting stolen from a store isn't really your problem as the manufacturer, the store doesn't get to go, "Hey somebody walked off with 5 of your products, you owe me 5 new ones for free.")
posted by soundguy99 at 9:43 AM on February 16, 2020
As a retailer, I have noticed a trend among some manufacturers to make their retail packaging much larger and more obnoxious than it needs to be. Standard commercial pegboard spacing is 1/4" holes on 1" centers. I don't know how many times I have been frustrated by some product's packaging that was designed in such a way that, when hung on a pegboard hook, the footprint of the product just barely violates that "grid pattern" so that it overlaps a neighboring product's space. This would require me to allocate significantly more precious display space in order to accommodate that packaging, but more often than not, either out of space efficiency or just spite, I will instead decline to stock the offending product and choose something with more reasonable and space-efficient packaging instead.
Keep that in mind as you work with your packaging designer. And please, ensure that there is something inside your packaging to minimize shifting of the contents, so that when hung from a hook, your product always hangs plumb and straight, and not crooked to one side because the contents shifted internally. I like my displays to look neat, and Epson inkjet cartridges rattling around in their overlarge boxes are the bane of my existence.
posted by xedrik at 9:44 AM on February 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
Keep that in mind as you work with your packaging designer. And please, ensure that there is something inside your packaging to minimize shifting of the contents, so that when hung from a hook, your product always hangs plumb and straight, and not crooked to one side because the contents shifted internally. I like my displays to look neat, and Epson inkjet cartridges rattling around in their overlarge boxes are the bane of my existence.
posted by xedrik at 9:44 AM on February 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
I wouldn't worry about theft deterrence. Theft isn't your job to worry about, that's the retailer's job.
Yeah, that’s a pretty simplistic view of it. Depending on the price point and size of the item, you can certainly have an impact on how your product is displayed at retail and thus how it sells. You don’t want to be behind the counter or in a locked cabinet if you can avoid it.
The retailer may do their job worrying about theft deterrence by not carrying your product if it isn’t packaged in a way that facilitates sales.
It’s absolutely worth your time going into some stores and seeing how similar or related items are packaged and displayed. If you can find an amenable store owner or clerk, you could even ask them directly what they think about the packaging of related products and what they would like to see. They almost certainly have opinions.
(If you want to be in retail stores, particularly independents, also consider how your online presence is going to direct customers to those stores.)
posted by jimw at 10:20 AM on February 16, 2020
Yeah, that’s a pretty simplistic view of it. Depending on the price point and size of the item, you can certainly have an impact on how your product is displayed at retail and thus how it sells. You don’t want to be behind the counter or in a locked cabinet if you can avoid it.
The retailer may do their job worrying about theft deterrence by not carrying your product if it isn’t packaged in a way that facilitates sales.
It’s absolutely worth your time going into some stores and seeing how similar or related items are packaged and displayed. If you can find an amenable store owner or clerk, you could even ask them directly what they think about the packaging of related products and what they would like to see. They almost certainly have opinions.
(If you want to be in retail stores, particularly independents, also consider how your online presence is going to direct customers to those stores.)
posted by jimw at 10:20 AM on February 16, 2020
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Transit testing is pretty common though. You could look into ISTA testing. Typically level 1 is sufficient for retail only items. If it is going to be shipped then consider level 3 or 6 for Amazon
posted by nolnacs at 9:07 AM on February 15, 2020 [1 favorite]