Starter Kit. Idea 152 of 500. Cluster 7
Packaging design studios
The mechanism, from the book
The tiny business pathway. A rural woman with an exceptional product should not need photography, English copy, packaging design and a distributor before the world can find her.
The first step
Choose one producer whose product is excellent but whose pack is a plain plastic bag, and design a new label and box for them on your own time. Print 10 mock-ups and take the old and new packs to a hotel gift shop together. Ask the manager which one they would stock and at what price. The price difference is what you can charge the producer.
- Who pays first
- A small producer who has been turned down by a gift shop or exporter because the packaging looked homemade.
- What leaves today
- Goods leave in plain bulk packs and are repacked abroad, where the pack adds much of the price the shopper finally pays.
Ask first
- Department of the Registrar of Companies. Ask how to register a small design studio.
- Sri Lanka Standards Institution. Ask what labelling standards packaging for food or export must follow.
Check before you spend
That designs are original, that clients own what they pay for, and that packaging meets the labelling rules of the markets clients sell into.
Find out these three numbers
- What will a small producer pay for a packaging design?
- How many producers in the district need new packaging?
- What does printing a first run cost them?
A comparison from the book
Sri Lanka. Appendix
"product in poor packaging with no story attached."
The commonest failure is a good product in poor packaging; fix that part.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.