Can you believe that we’ve been making products for 3 and a half years now?! It seems like only yesterday we were installing an industrial laser cutter in our bedroom in Hackney and setting up our first ever market in Spitalfields!
Since then a lot has changed and improved. For one our packaging has developed along the way, and we’ve got to a point now where we send parcels in a consistent way which works and our customers are happy.
However, when you see something every day, you can’t help but notice small things that you could improve. Ways of making things more streamlined, time-effective and more visually impressive. These are some of the things that are we would like to work on to make it even better:
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MAILING BAGS
Firstly, we currently send our jewellery and flat homewares out in biodegradable mailing bags. And although that’s supposedly fine environmentally speaking, we are unsure how many actually get to biodegrade in landfill rather than get incinerated. So if this can change to a cardboard mailing box then that would be preferable. Also it doesn’t look that great to receive a plastic bag in the mail! Sorry about that folks.
2. POSTAL LABELS
We currently print out postal labels on a printer and fix them to the bag using brown paper tape. Environmentally speaking both are fine because they are biodegradable and recyclable, but it takes a lot of time to do this, it uses a fair amount of tape and ink cartridges are expensive to replace.
3. WRAPPING
We hand wrap every jewellery gift box in brown paper and tape with a biodegradable sticker with our logo on. Although this is fine environmentally, it takes a fair amount of time to wrap each one and maybe doesn’t have that wow factor that it should do.
4. JEWELLERY GIFT BOXES
All of our earrings currently arrive in a paper-based gift box which is made from 100% recycled material and is recyclable once again. This is great in terms of it being eco and them looking nice, but some of the boxes don’t fit through the Royal Mail Large Letter sizing by a couple of millimetres so occasionally we have to pay for a parcel to be sent. It also takes a fair while to make the orange laser cut sleeves and glue them.
All in all, there is definitely room for improvement with our packaging. What we like most about it is that it’s all environmentally considered… either biodegradable or recyclable, and we like the jewellery gift boxes. But just because it’s all set up and running doesn’t mean we shouldn't think about improving it if we can.
Watch this space! More designs coming very soon :)
Mark & Ali x