Customize Product Packaging in China: A Complete Guide

In the present day, making own brand product are handy, and even open to small business or startups. The easiest way to have own brand product is to print your company logo on the packaging, and China has an incredibly wide array of suppliers in packaging industry, offering all kinds solution for product packaging.

In the following article, we will discuss why China is the right place to source customized packaging manufacturers and the costs you need to be aware of. We also take a brief look into how to make own design packaging when you import products from China.

1. Why Need Customized Packaging?

Most small business buyers import no brands products from China, but seldom use own design packaging. However, customized packaging is extremely beneficial for startups and small businesses. They can create their own brands, without engaging in a complex, time consuming and expensive product development process. All you need to do is to choose a supplier ready to provide a good quality product to be sold to your target customers. You can then cover it with your own packaging; print your company logo on the packaging and sell these products in to the market. This will give your brand quick popularity and success in the local market.

Many suppliers do not give much significance to the packaging of the products. They sell the products to the customers with the original factory’s design and packing. Sometimes these products are sold with some other company’s information on the box. This is because Chinese suppliers offer other customer’s packing design, and don’t understand the information printed on the box. Thus, you end up selling your product under some other brand name.

At other instances the factory’s original packaging makes the product look dull and uninteresting. Here if you just incur a little extra cost in packaging the products again, it will make the product look more attractive. You can easily increase the price of newly packaged product by 5-10% or even more. This will also differentiate your product from your competitors’, even if both buy the product from the same Chinese suppliers.

Different packaging MOQ and reference price will be described in detail in the next article of our blog in future.

2. Is Customized Packing Expensive?

Most sellers buy products and sell them to the customers without own packaging. There are two main reasons behind this approach. First they don’t know much about customized packaging and think it is an extremely expensive affair. Second they perceive that customized packaging is available only on very big orders. So never try it for small orders.

However the fact is that customized packaging is cheap and available even on very small orders in China. In the following description we will analyze two common situations for this issue.

Situation #1: Use factory’s original packing, with your design.

Let’s take “turtle projector light” as example, which we help our customer sourced before.
The factories provide ‘turtle lights’ in normal design boxes (the box towards the right in the photo). This box is used by most turtle light factories for supplying their products to the customers. Using same packing box is a quite common act in China for small factories, because they never think about doing own design. You can find this black box on Alibaba, Ebay, Amazon, and everywhere.

Our customer did his own design box (the left one in the photo), and only paid $100 fee for the printing model. And he ordered 1,000pcs this products, which means he only paid $0.1 extra fee per product. With his own design and brand on box, he can easily sell this product $1 higher price than competitors, who are using factory’s black box.

For box packing, product factory usually will help make your own design packing, and usually will charge $80-$100 printing model fee at the first time, and there’s no more fee for future orders. But sometimes there will be around $40 for each order, for assembling model on the printing machine. Please keep this in mind, because some suppliers will offer you low product price, but high fee for customized packing. However, the fee still depends on different packing types.

Situation #2: Customize packing in other printing companies in China.

Sometimes for certain products, it might so happen that suppliers don’t offer any packaging for the products; or you don’t like the product packaging. In both these cases you need to find printing companies or factories for produce your packing, and deliver to the product factory.

One of our customers bought 2,000 pcs ofteddy bear at a price of $1.3. But, the supplier offered the bear without any packaging. We then searched for a printing factory to print packaging for the customers’ toy and got three solutions for our problem:

1. OPP bag with own Logo at the rate of $0.03 each for MOQ 3,000 pcs.
2. Paper card with own design at the rate of $0.065 each for MOQ 2,000 pcs.
3. Colorful box with own design at the rate of $0.19 each for 2,000pcs.

The customer finally chose box packing with own design for packaging the toys. Because he can sell $1 higher price than Teddy Bear without any packing.

3. How to Customize Your Packaging?

The process of customizing your packaging is extremely simple and is explained in the following discussion:

• Search the related products on Alibaba and look for the different kinds of packaging offered with similar products. This will help you to get some inspiration and idea about packaging.
• Select the appropriate packaging according to the product you will be offering to your customers. (About the different types of packaging, you can refer to our article here)
• If your supplier can help you with the print work, you should be all set to design your artwork required for packaging. This should be saved as AI files in your system.
• If you cannot find a designer to design your packaging, you can find experienced designers on Elance to help you design your product packaging. All you need to do is, to give them an idea about the picture and type of design you want for packaging.
• If your supplier can’t help you with the customized packaging of your product, then you can find a printing supplier on Alibaba and get your design printed.
• In case you find a printing supplier on Alibaba, then consider his location before making a final decision for hiring him. The location should be in close vicinity to your product supplier. Confirm the domestic delivery fee to product supplier’s place before making any commitments to any of them. Or you will end up paying huge amount of money on product delivery to and fro the printers place.
• Try to find a supplier in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province. This region is popularly known as the “Printing City of China”. There are numerous printing suppliers out here and lots of them offer printing service for very small quantity.