What opportunities have you evaluated this year when it comes to increasing your revenue, driving more profit, and elevating your customer and partner experiences? Has on-demand and right-size packaging crossed your mind?
As print-on-demand (POD) continues to explode across the industry, more apparel decorators are taking on the fulfillment process, often packing and shipping product directly to the end-user on behalf of a partner. Rather than put something in a plastic bag (boring and bad for the environment), decorators should consider on-demand packaging.
But where to start? We went to the experts at Packsize for some information. Following, Brian Reinhart, chief revenue officer, dives into the details.
Apparelist: What trends have you witnessed over the last few years when it comes to on-demand and right-size packaging?
Reinhart: I think the predominant trend is just value creation. It’s a really broad term, but I think companies are looking for ways to create value through every segment of their base of their business. What’s unique about the packaging segment of the business is that it touches so many areas of a company. If you think internally to the business, [apparel decorators] can save money on their operations, within their distribution and warehousing. Then within their end-user experience — their marketing, their engagement side of the business — you kind of get two birds with one stone.
This industry grows so rapidly because you’re able to create multiple value points with one type of investment. Automation in general has been one of the fastest growing industries in the world over the last 10 years. But we’ve really seen packaging on-demand, custom, ad hoc, bespoke packaging explode in the last three years, as I think people have started to uncover all of those value points. At first it was, we can save on our corrugated usage. And then it was, we can reduce our labor in the warehouse. Oh, our buyers love this experience much better. Oh, we get less returns. Oh, we save on our dunnage. And over time, you just get value stack on top of value stack.
Apparelist: How do you really see this impacting apparel decorators specifically?
Reinhart: What’s unique about apparel is that it’s a form of expression. And so I think there’s always going to be a niche segment of the market, there’s always going to be an evolution. There’s always going to be something on the cutting edge with apparel that is just impossible to capture, it’s impossible to commercialize. And when you have that kind of uniqueness within your product, that is always going to require infrastructure to support, and so you can’t just take it and tuck it into existing infrastructure, because it’s always evolving.
In the simplest terms, you’ll always have new companies popping up in the apparel space. A dishwasher doesn’t, because all dishwashers are kind of the same, right? That’s what I think is really unique and cool about apparel, footwear, things like that.
What that means for us [on the [packaging side] is that the cool kid today needs a warehouse. They need packaging equipment. They need distribution infrastructure. And then the cool kid tomorrow is also going to need that.
Read this full feature on Apparelist, a publication of PRINTING United Alliance, ASI’s strategic partner.
