Meeting Aloha’s Uncompromising Commitment To Quality
Aloha is a company created to provide healthy living through their nutritional products. They reached out to Prestone Press to assist in creating packaging for their new product lines that matched their company values. Their packages needed to be:
- Printed as sustainably as possible,
- Designed to fit in shipping packages they were repurposing,
- Ship flat and be assembled at THEIR facility
- Hold product and product literature tightly in place
- Minimize cost per package
Aloha approached us in the initial stages, enabling us to guide and support them throughout the entire process. Every step of the way they were looking to us for our expertise, best paper, printing practices, how to set up files, ship efficiently, etc. We partnered with them from the inception and became a deeply trusted advisor. Here’s how it unfolded…
A little about Aloha
Aloha’s mission is to help you feel healthier and happier by providing simple, high-quality products and inspiring content.
Rooted in social and ecological responsibility, Aloha doesn’t compromise quality, ever. At work, at home, in life, they live by their values. They are committed to quality, dedicated to honesty, inspired by design, and strive for simplicity.
Partnering with Aloha to create packaging that perfectly fit their needs was both exciting and challenging.
We began with the basics
The best sustainable stock to use for their needs was Neenah 18pt folding board, 100 % post consumer waste, the most sustainable paper available. It offers an elegant look while still being functional and sustainable.
The Package Design
Once we knew the substrate we were going to work with, we began looking at their design needs. They wanted to repurpose their shipping boxes and decided to design their packaging around them.
Aloha gave us a paper comp of their initial concept and asked us to design a structure and advise them if it was feasible to do within a timely manner and a price-conscious budget.
Our biggest challenge was designing the structure fit into the shipping box and be functional from an engineering standpoint. There were a number of variables that had to fit together. They wanted the base of the box to have walls while leaving enough room for the product to fit AND have the walls be wide enough while still fitting into the shipping box.
Additionally, it was essential to be able to automate the finishing to avoid the high cost of hand assembly. After multiple prototypes, we figured out how to construct the base, where the process was automated to glue, using minimal manual labor for assembly.
Tweaking the structure
They liked the structure. When they filled it with the product the variety of products where shifting around and mixing up and they needed to send literature along with the box. Their first thought was to put the literature on top of the box inside the shipping box without the literature shifting too much.
We suggested putting all the literature inside the box and made tabs on the base to hold the literature in place. It serves two purposes; the tabs held the literature in place and the literature helped hold the product in place. They LOVED the idea! We went with it and it worked like a charm.
Final Packaging Requirements
One of our challenges was that Aloha wanted the boxes shipped flat, taking up less space and costing less, as they would assemble them and shipping flat would be more cost effective.
We were able to design some of their packages ship flat, but this particular one was too complex a box (made up of three pieces) so we had to ship them assembled. Along with this came a shipping challenge, packing so that the packages would not get crushed in route. We used smaller boxes and rather than stacking the boxes on top of on another we packed them on their sides, side by side.
The client was delighted with both the process and the final product and has experienced continued growth that has resulted in numerous re-orders!
According to Belal Aftab, Director of Operations at Aloha, “Carlos and the Prestone team are always there when we need them. They are extremely efficient and responsive, always a pleasure to work with and consistently deliver for us, especially when we are facing tight timelines.”