Polymailers, the new packaging flagship
For years, packaging has consisted in cardboard boxes, as a industry standard and habit. The past years have seen a new comer in the shipping industry, the polymailers!
Based on the constatation that all goods aren’t fragile and don’t need a space taking box, the lightweight and costless polymailers allow dropshippers and online brands to send their product in a nice branded way.
The benefits of polymailers
Polymailers display a lot of benefits, indeed, you may consider the following:
- lower environment impact than cardboard
- Typically cheaper to purchase than kraft or corrugated shipping solutions
- Weather proof
- Very thin, so they take up less storage space than boxes
- Durable and don’t easily get torn
- Sometimes reusable, depending on how they are designed
When should you opt for polymailers?
Poly mailers are ideal for clothing and other fabric-based goods, as well as yarns and patterns. They also work well for shoes and certain types of hats. We’ve seen them work well for boxed products that need to be shipped in another, outside layer (i.e. a shoebox, a small toy or a jewelry box).
There are two questions you must raise:
Is my product fragile?
If your answer is yes, and the product is fragile, then poly mailers won’t likely the right solution for you. You probably want to go with standard boxes. If the answer is somewhat, then poly mailers might work for you but you’d likely have to use protection and padding, such as packing paper, bubble, old newspapers or something similar. If the answer is NO, than poly mailers are probably the best way to go!
Can the product properly fit in the poly mailer?
The post office sorts and ships tons of packages daily, with a lot of machining and scanning involved in the process. A poorly filled poly mailer with flat spots can get caught in or misread by machinery. This can lead to errors, delays, damages or even returns to sender on the products you ship out.
While the polymailers are a great to adapt to the shape of a product, you should take care of choosing the right sizes. Not sure about the size you should take? You can easily test it as home by cutting and taping plastic bags such as trashbags so you can figure out what would be the perfect fit for your polymailers without any cost.
What to expect from polymailers in terms of branding?
The great part from polymailers apart from their light weight and cost is the branding opportunity! At the packtory, we can design pretty much anything on the polymailers.
You choose the base color of the plastic, and we define your packaging design so it reflects your brand and tease your clients when they receive their package.