Have you considered making your own packaging?
I’m not talking about designing your own box and handing a sketch to a designer, but actually producing your own boxes? I did some research online and discovered it’s not as complicated as I thought:
While it was certainly time consuming, the hardest part was printing the artwork, but with the right printer, it’s entirely an option, creating the opportunity to produce bespoke boxes for which you would charge a high premium. Naturally, you’ll need a high quality product to put inside, but as they’re made to order, your investment is in the machinery, not high volumes of packaging stock.
The two key pieces of equipment are a printer that can handle card and a die-cutting machine.
The printer will need to handle a card thickness of 350gsm and upward. As an example, my own retail boxes are 380gsm. Standard household printers will often handle much higher thicknesses than they’re rated for (usually under 300gsm), but it’s a strain on them so I wouldn’t recommend doing it often. You’ll also want an A3 printer to make even a small box. The Epson P700 (Amazon affiliate link) comes recommended on a number of sites .
The die-cutting technology I always pictured being a big industrial machine, but it turns out the highly popular Cricut (Amazon affiliate link) crafting machine is exactly that. You can even get a scoring tool for it, to make the folds in your card.
With these two pieces of equipment you can quickly produce your own boxes. A hot glue gun will provide the seal and after that a Google for box templates will get you started. There are lots of professional templates available cheap on Etsy too.
To turn your plain white box into a thing of beauty you’ll need to use design software, but it doesn’t have to be as complicated or expensive as Photoshop or Indesign. You can even use Canva, as long as you can upload the template you find, then draw over it. The Cricut software is called Design Space; I found it a little tricky to get started with, but there are tons of tutorials on YouTube that walk you through it.
This is an introduction to what a Cricut machine can do:
So for a set up under £1,000, the next cost is card stock and your time, which for a premium product is fully chargeable and gives you a customisable, bespoke design, as often as you like. To go completely design mad, search foiling, embossing and Cricut metallic pens on YouTube to find yourself in crafting heaven.