Designing my Own Packaging {Small Business Owner}

I’ve got a few ‘small business’ posts coming this week because my business is off the ground and I have had a few orders! This has made me consider how I want to package up these orders, the type of invoices I want to make and the type of business brand I want to develop. In this post, I will be designing my own packaging using Canva.

Right now I am only selling cards. I have aspirations to sell more than that in the future, but I am determined to do this slowly so I don’t burn out and then give up. To package just these cards, I decided I wanted to protect them with a card postage envelope, and also make it look pretty (and branded) by using custom designed vellum and a branded sticker.

Designing my Own Packaging: Vellum

In Canva, I brought up a blank A4 document. All my cards are A6 size, so A4 printed vellum seemed the perfect size to pack both a single and multiple cards. For those of you who are unsure what vellum is, it is a type of tracing paper. Obviously not all tracing paper is the same quality and thickness. I did not want a tissue paper thinness because I thought it would be tricky to print on paper that thin at home. Instead, I went for a good quality 93gsm thickness.

Anyway, back to Canva. I wanted it to be pretty and to be branded with my logo. Playing about with colours and logo placement, I tried it in colour and black and white and finally made it translucent:

I made a couple of design sheets, one with larger logos and one with smaller logos.

Printing my Design on Vellum…Or Not

Of the two above designs I was not sure which one I preferred, so I attempted to print out a copy of both.

Attempted being the operative word here!

I quickly discovered, much to my frustration, that my printer did not have a vellum paper option and therefore did not recognise the vellum as a printable paper. This caused one paper jam after another.

After approximately 5793 attempts, I gave up.

Not to be deterred, and a bit like a dog with a bone, I came up with an alternate option. A ‘for-now’ option. Not perfect by any means, but it would do. I used my custom made stamp and stamped my logo in black all over the piece of vellum paper.

Now vellum is non-absorptive. In layman’s terms, and for practicality’s sake, this means stamping vellum with ink is very tedious. Each stamp takes about 15 minutes to try. This means being incredibly careful not to smudge the stamps which came before.

Darn it! I couldn’t be my normal lackadaisical self! It took a while, and was most definitely not sustainable long term:

I was pleased by the effect though. However, in future I will be custom printing my design above in colour onto vellum using a company whose printer does just that! I have sourced a company in the UK and it will cost me about 22p per sheet of vellum. Obviously, this eats into profits but I shall try to account for these in my packing and postage fees.

Designing my own Packaging: Stickers

Obviously, in order to use the vellum paper as wrapping paper, I needed something to keep it in place. Enter some custom made stickers. Using Printed.com, I have ordered 800 stickers at the cost of £30, which is about 4p per sticker. These stickers will be round with my logo:

These are coming through tomorrow. Until then I will use glue and a cut out logo from a batch of misprinted cards to fix the wrapping vellum

The card envelopes cost just under 11p each which means total packaging costs will be 37p plus my time. This is just at the higher end of recommended packaging costs for small businesses.

It might be, in the future, that I look for less expensive packaging costs, but for now I’m pretty happy with what I’ve chosen.