Why Few Packaging Box Manufacturer Can Make Odd Shaped Boxes?

Designers can freely display their creativity, unconstrained! Maybe they should do. But so often their ideas will kill the packaging box manufacturers. What is the reason? If you tour some packaging factories and listen to them, you should take some hint. Designers usually care little about the processing method and craftsmanship of boxes, or rather, they just consider more how to be more creative and look good when designing. But some ideas are very hard to achieve in the later stage of mass production. Actually, most factories would flatly decline odd-shaped gift boxes order.

Why Few Packaging Box Manufacturer Can Make Odd Shaped Boxes?

Although any box type of gift boxes can be mass produced, the prices vary a lot. Take the two gift boxes for example: Lid & base Boxes and Clamshell Boxes of similar size. With the same materials used, their prices would be much different, which is a fact recognized by all packaging box manufacturers. because they differ a lot in the difficulty of the workmanship and material consumables. Therefore, the price difference between a Lid & base gift box (the simplest) and a odd-shaped cardboard box (the most difficult) would be huge, even though with similar sizes and materials.

1. Gift Boxes Craftsmanship. 

Some standard or common box types can be mass produced in streamline, automatically or semi-automatically. Some examples include lid & base box, tube gift boxes, and book-shaped rigid boxes etc. Once the materials are ready, it takes only a few days to finish a big order. However, if it takes 2 days to form lid & base boxes, it would take at least ten days for special-shaped boxes of the same quantity. That's because odd-shaped gift boxes (not to mention some highly personalized weird shaped gift boxes) require all hand crafting. Not all factories have such a team of well-trained workers skilled in hand crafting. Generally, packaging box manufacturers are reluctant to accept odd-shaped boxes. It is not only difficult to make, but the high manual costs. If they are not experienced in these boxes, they would probably lose money even if the prices quoted are high...

2. Materials Scrapping with Odd-shaped Gift Boxes

All paper and grey board shipped out from paper mill come in two formats, that is Format A (889*1194mm) and Format B (787*1092mm). That means all the major materials we need in making cardboard gift boxes are cut from the two sizes. So in practice, it's almost impossible that the whole sheets can be formed into gift boxes. Large size and odd-shaped gift boxes would usually scrap many paper and paperboard material.