Stretching the Packaging Budget for a Great Customer Experience At Home and In the Store
Is your brand’s packaging making your customers happy no matter where they shop?
Pity the poor retail purchasing manager who for the past 18 months has been responsible for planning for their business’s packaging needs. When the pandemic hit, few were prepared for the mass movement from in-store to at-home shopping. While luxury retailers have long relied on premium shopping bags to elevate the in-store shopping experience and advertise their brand, their mailed packaging programs often landed with a bit of a thud. Now, just as many retailers are adjusting to growing consumer expectations for a fabulous unboxing experience, customers are finding their way back to the store.
With packaging budgets to consider, how do retailers provide a great shopping experience for customers both at home and in the store? We suggest a packaging program audit that combines both value engineering and SKU rationalization to uncover savings to stretch the budget further.
Value engineering involves the close examination of a product to ensure the optimal use of materials, technique and construction, often resulting in decreased cost, improved quality, or both. Applied to retail packaging, it can involve selecting different materials to meet the same design and quality specifications but at lower cost, perhaps by using a different material type. It can involve changing specifications, from say a rigid box to one that packs flat, ships in fewer containers, and can be stored using less space. Or, as customers focus more on the environment, it might involve moving from bleached and laminated papers to less costly, more recyclable brown kraft paper.
Michael Jobes, director of national sales for AnnJoy, often works with national retailers to find program efficiencies that allow them to improve their overall packaging program. “I might look at a premium shopping bag constructed of two-sided bleached and laminated paper and suggest savings by eliminating the bleaching and lamination on the bag’s interior. This creates savings that can be repurposed to improve a brand’s at-home customer experience.” This optimization is more important as in-store sales increase from their pandemic level but at-home shopping continues to be convenient and popular with the customer.