Print guides · 4 min read
Six ways to cut packaging cost without cheapening the box
When a packaging quote comes back too high, the usual response is to make the box thinner or drop the finish. Both work, and both are visible to your customer. There are cheaper savings available first, and most of them come from how the job is set up rather than what it is made of.
1. Order the quantity the press is built for
Print cost is mostly fixed cost spread across the run. Plates, make-ready and running the press up to colour cost the same whether you print five thousand cartons or fifty thousand, so the unit price falls steeply as quantity rises and then flattens out.
The saving is in finding where it flattens. Ask for pricing at three quantities rather than one. Buyers regularly discover that doubling the order raises the total bill by a third, which is the cheapest per-unit improvement available anywhere in this list.
2. Let the sheet decide the carton size
Cartons are die-cut from a printed sheet, and the number that fit on that sheet is what you are actually paying for. A carton five millimetres too wide can drop a whole row off the layout, so you buy the same paper and get fewer boxes from it.
Before the design is fixed, ask the printer to check the nesting. Adjusting a dimension slightly to fit another row is invisible to the customer and can take a real percentage off the unit cost. This is the saving buyers most often miss, because it has to happen early.
3. Drop a colour before you drop the finish
Every additional spot colour is another plate, another unit on the press and another wash-up. A design using four-colour process plus two Pantones is materially more expensive to run than one using four-colour plus one.
Often one of those spot colours is doing very little, or can be reproduced acceptably within CMYK. Reviewing the colour build is worth more than reducing the lamination, because nobody has ever picked up a box and noticed it used five colours instead of six.
4. Specify board by what it must survive
Board is usually the largest single material cost, and it is frequently over-specified out of caution. A carton that ships inside a corrugated outer, sits on a shelf and is opened once does not need the stiffness of one that will be handled repeatedly.
The way to do this safely is to test rather than guess. Ask for samples in two board weights, pack them as they will actually ship, and handle them. If the lighter board holds up through that, it will hold up in the supply chain, and the saving applies to every unit you ever order.
5. Gang related jobs into one run
If you have several products in the same board and the same colour build, printing them together shares the setup instead of paying for it repeatedly. Three variants of one product line are the obvious candidate.
This needs planning rather than negotiation: the jobs have to be ready at the same time. Brands that keep a packaging calendar and order variants together consistently pay less than brands that order each one when it runs out.
6. Freeze the artwork before you order
Changes made after plates are made are charged, and changes made after the press has started are charged heavily. A late text correction can cost more than the entire finish you were considering removing.
Build one proper approval step instead: everyone who can object sees the artwork on the dieline, signs it, and then it is closed. It costs a few days at the start and it removes the most expensive category of packaging cost there is.
Where not to cut
Two economies reliably cost more than they save. Skipping a physical proof on a first production run means the first time anyone sees the real colour is when the full quantity has been printed. And removing a coating that was protecting a dark or heavily handled surface produces a pack that reaches the shelf looking damaged.
If you want the cost taken out of a specific job rather than in general, send the artwork and the dieline with your quote request and ask where the savings are. It is a more useful question than asking for a discount, and the answer is usually worth more.
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