Packaging Economics for Online Sellers#
Week 1 — Reading a Box#
Sustainability language on a box is mostly marketing.#
What actually decides how it’s built: a shipping-cost formula and a return/liability calculation.
Three boxes, three logics#
- Apple — brand experience
- lululemon / Patagonia — logistics cost
- OnTheList — regulatory compliance
None of the three needed an appeal to the environment.
1. Apple#
A layered reveal. Accessories hidden behind a second panel, found by touch. Every material and colour agrees with every other one.
None of this is required to get a phone to your door intact.
It’s required to make opening the box feel like part of buying the phone.
2. lululemon, Patagonia#
A pair of shoes ships in a box several sizes too big.
Not generosity — a retailer shipping thousands of SKUs a day saves real money stocking three or four standard box sizes instead of one per product.
The extra cardboard and air freight is the price of that standardisation.
3. OnTheList#
A tear-strip moulded into the box. An “Aviation Security” dangerous-goods label on the side.
Neither is about you. Both exist because a regulator requires them before a flammable liquid goes on a plane.
A description is easy to argue with. The rest of this course puts numbers behind it.
Where we’re going#
- Week 2 — what the box is made of, and what that costs
- Week 3 — what “survives shipping” is tested against
- Week 4 — the formula a carrier actually bills against
- Week 5 — who publishes the sustainability numbers, and why
This week’s lab#
Bring a real package. Test the three logics against it — before we have any formulas to check your guess with.