What Specialty Packaging Can Do for Your Products
When making your products stand out, package quality is a differentiator like no other.
Rigid, boring, wasteful, low-quality packaging is no longer acceptable; today’s consumers seek more. The fact is, the customer experience with your product begins at first sight.
How does the package design engage shoppers visually? What makes it different from other products on the shelf or ecommerce page? What is their experience of opening the package? How does your brand story get told in the process?
Specialty packaging offers new possibilities and solutions to make that striking first impression and keep customers returning for more.
Ready to step up your game and put your brand on the map? Here’s how specialty packaging can improve your custom products, brand identity, and business.
What Is Specialty Packaging?
Specialty packaging has a lot to offer your brand. But what exactly does the term mean?
Sometimes referred to as luxury packaging or custom packaging, specialty packaging pays increased attention to a wider range of details.
This type of packaging puts extra focus on its research, design, development, and manufacturing phases to create something unique and original.
The goal here is to secure products for shipping and storage and use packaging to extend a brand’s identity, increase functionality, boost the perception of value, quality, and exclusivity, and ultimately enhance a brand’s appeal.
Let’s dive deep into what specialty packaging can offer your products.
How Does Specialty Packaging Differ From Standard Packaging?
All packaging must meet specific criteria. Even standard packaging must keep a product structurally sound, meet industry safety and legal requirements, and clearly label what product is contained within the packaging.
Product-specific warnings may also be needed with certain drugs or chemicals.
Specialty packaging differs from standard packaging by raising the bar from these bare minimums to help bring a product up a notch.
The increasing popularity of custom packaging has grown out of consumer demand for higher quality packaging and the need for brands to distinguish their products in increasingly competitive markets.
These key features, to name a few, put specialty packaging into a class of its own:
Better Customization
As opposed to low-quality plastics and rigid cardboard with few customization options in size and graphics, specialty packaging goes the distance in these categories. Brands and consumers want increased visual appeal from gloss, matte, combination finishes, eye-popping colors, and text options.
Better Unboxing and Unique Feel
Luxury packaging offers a unique unboxing experience. This could include multiple smaller boxes inside, manuals, and printed inserts about the product and brand, enhancing the experience as the consumer unboxes. This makes a product feel unique and exciting, like opening a treasure chest.
Increased Barrier Protections
The elements can take their toll on products as they travel through the supply chain. Specialty packaging offers increased barrier protection from oil, moisture, oxygen, contamination, and other common hazards.
More Branded Elements
A repetition of the brand name on different elements in the package provides continuity through the opening process and helps establish brand identity. Interior packaging can be a fun surprise to discover when unboxing.
Lower Packaging to Product Ratio
Standard rigid packaging is inefficient and frequently wasteful. This type of packaging often uses excess materials. Specialty packaging aims to contain its contents with less packaging without sacrificing product integrity. This is important in today’s market as consumers increasingly emphasize sustainability and environmental concerns.
What Formats and Materials Are Available for Specialty Packaging?
Beyond the visual and experiential aspects, specialty packaging also considers new and exciting formats and materials of a higher quality.
Flexible Mylar pouches are a great example of packaging that checks many boxes. Mylar is distinct due to the unique stretching process it undergoes during manufacturing. This process gives Mylar increased durability compared to other plastics of lower quality.
This material offers a flexible format that can last throughout the product cycle while offering a wide range of customization options.
Recyclable steel tins can be a good packaging choice for the eco-conscious consumer and brand needing a rigid format — achieving sustainability goals and maintaining product integrity.
Setup boxes are another engaging specialty or custom format. These boxes use rigid paperboard to house their products and place the customer experience at the forefront of packaging concerns.
Setup boxes incorporate layers, unique graphics, fonts, inserts, unique coatings, and textures into their design, all of which help build customer excitement.
Other Elements of Specialty Packaging
Each industry and product type has unique concerns and requirements regarding safety features and other packaging components.
For medications, cannabis, household chemicals, and other products, child resistance is a must-have, providing both consumer and brand peace of mind, as well as legal compliance.
Dymapak has prioritized researching and creating superior child-resistant packaging to achieve these goals.
In medical, cannabis, high-value, or adult products, discretion is a top concern. Discreet specialty packaging ensures that the viewer can’t visually determine the contents of a package just by looking at it. This could mean opaque, plain, or otherwise generic packaging.
In the cannabis industry, an odor-proof barrier is usually needed. Standard packaging simply doesn’t go far enough to meet this consumer and brand demand.
What Products Benefit From Specialty Packaging?
Now that we understand the importance and versatility of specialty packaging, what products can benefit from the luxury and custom touch?
Here are some industries and examples that shine with specialty packaging:
Food and Beverage
In the food and beverage industries, freshness and safety are top concerns. Flexible pouches offer durability and barrier protection against the elements needed to prevent oxidation, moisture, and contamination.
For high-quality snacks, drinks, and ingredients, custom packaging can go a long way in creating a premium look and feel.
Coffee and Tea
Specialty packaging has become an industry standard for loose-leaf or bagged teas and ground or whole-bean coffee.
Flexible custom packaging formats not only offer superior package-to-product ratios, but they also help keep contents at their peak freshness for longer.
Household Products
Many household products contain ingredients that could be toxic if ingested or mishandled. Detergent, dishwashing pods, and other chemicals are a few examples.
Opaque Mylar pouches with child-resistant features can keep them safely contained.
Vitamins and Supplements
Vitamins and supplements, especially those high in iron, need a child-resistant closure that makes it significantly difficult for those under five to open.
For these products, an opaque specialty package is highly desirable, helping to reduce potential poisonings as children could mistake the contents for candy.
Rarities and Collectibles
What is more special than rarities and collectibles? Avid collectors tend to spend big money on their coveted items.
For products like these, the unique feel and look of a setup box can add to the feeling of ceremony and significance that these consumers place on their collectibles while keeping them safely intact.
Gifts and Thank-You Sets
We want our gift recipients to feel special when marking a significant occasion.
For these kinds of products, setup boxes and other packaging types with unique unboxing elements are a great choice.
Cannabis Products
Child resistance, flexibility, barrier protection, discretion, odor-proofing, and superior design are likely the top concerns for cannabis products.
Durable, flexible pouches with child-resistant features are becoming the industry standard because they meet the strenuous demands of this rapidly growing market.
How Does Dymapak Master Specialty Packaging?
In specialty packaging, Dymapak innovates and pushes forward standards for high-profile brands in many industries.
Here are a few of our top products that offer unique, high-quality custom packaging solutions for your products.
Secure Sack and Eco
The Secure Sack is the world’s first lab-certified child-resistant bag. It offers the peace of mind that business owners, brands, and consumers seek in industries including food, cannabis, tech components, and household products. It is also highly customizable in size and design.
If sustainability and recyclability matter most to your brand, we now offer the Secure Sack Eco — our flexible and fully recyclable pouch with the same durability, barrier protections, and child-resistant press-to-seal closures as the Secure Sack.
SecuriTin
Using minimal plastic, the SecuriTin is a rigid and durable tin featuring a locking mechanism for safety and security. Its toughness and child-resistant features safeguard toxic and potentially hazardous contents.
The SecuriTin is ideal for coffee, edibles, vapes and cartridges, lotions, and topicals.
Twistspenser
Dymapak’s Twistspenser provides an innovative solution to liquid and concentrate packaging. Intended to contain viscous oils in a discreet lipstick-style design and child-resistant format, it can dispense liquids of all thicknesses with no leakage.
The Twistspenser is also customizable, coming in various colors, full-color print labels, and an outer box for optimal customer experience.
Give Your Products the Specialty Treatment
Giving your product the specialty treatment can take your effect from just another contender to a leader in your industry.
Trading in outdated and low-quality standard packaging for luxury packaging can help you create the visual identity for your brand while still delivering on safety, security, preservation, and logistics.
Get started today and see what specialty packaging can do for your next product update.
Sources:
SPC 101: Transport Packaging | Sustainable Packaging Coalition
Food Packaging Materials and Recycling | Food Packaging Forum