Branding and Recycled Shipping Boxes

Yesterday, I was making an attempt to pull off shipping and hazard labels off several recycled shipping boxes that I have received in the past from Amazon.  It was very tough going and the labels were winning.  This frustrations got me thinking last night about a solution and I thought I would share that with you.

First you might ask, "Why not just buy cardboard boxes for my Etsy business?"   I would agree with you if I were shipping out large quantities of boxes each week.  Most of my sales fit into one of the 3 sizes of rigid shipping envelopes and 2 sizes of 1st class mail envelopes.  In 2021, I made it a focus to up my branding efforts when I ship out art prints, cards stickers, recipe cards and other inventory that are rather flat.  Check out all my cute art on my ETSY SHOP - JULIE TOWNSEND STUDIO

* I hand write a small message on the outside of each envelope

* I print cute stickers to have on hand to decorate

* I stamp my own wrapping paper using rolls of painters paper that you can buy at the hardware store

* I cut tiny confetti pieces of my original artwork with my Cricut just to give that extra WOW factor

I have this part well covered and receive positive reviews that specifically mention these little efforts.  5 star ratings is what it is all about!

I just can't at this point buy boxes when they are arriving almost daily at my door.  I break down the smaller boxes or the ones I feel would fit my smaller canvases in and store them in my inventory room.  I even roll up all the brown packing paper and some of the bubble wrap to add to my shipping supplies.  Here I would like to say that I would use the word FRUGAL to describe myself but my kids would tell you that I was CHEAP,

SOLUTION:  I decided to design a full sheet sticker that actually looks like cardboard.  I don't want to wrap the whole box and the Post Office doesn't want you to use shipping paper anymore.  Besides, I have never been good at wrapping boxes!  I then added faint graphic images to make the stickers pretty.  I came up with 3.  The first design is using farm animals of course.  I have to go back and make sure but I think each of these farm animals came from a public domain site and are free to use and since I'm not selling these, I'm good to add them to my sticker.  2nd design was a pattern of flying bees that I downloaded off Pixabay.com and finally, the 3rd design is actually my little bees and doodlebird drawings.  They are all so cute and now I have chooses when covering up nasty shipping labels.

STUDIO PRINTERS - I might make a mention about printer ink here and I get asked often about my printers.   I have 3 printers in my studio - 1.  Canon Pixma Pro 100 (I use this for all my art prints and is expensive to use)  2.  HP 8035 (This one prints cards, stickers and other small items.  Quality is okay and I have it set up on the HPInstaink program for 500 copies a month $18.99)  The ink cartridges are sent to me automatically and are included in the monthly fee.  For a business I think this is a good choice.  My last printer 3. Epson ET 2650 is an Ecotank printer that I purchased probably 5 years ago from Sam's Club.  It came with bottles of ink at that time and I purchased an extra set of ink refills and if you can believe it,  I STILL HAVE INK.  I'm getting ready to pour the last of each bottle into my printer soon.  The print quality is not art level by any means but for all the household printing, packing slips, shipping labels and now these shipping stickers, it's as if I'm printing free. It's the perfect printer for just this type of label printing. I do have to run the print head cleaning utility pretty often but it has been a good investment.

I promise this is the last thing I'm going to mention today about my CHEAP branding efforts.  I just ordered some rolls of brown packing tape that will fit on my tape roller so that I can even cover up the Amazon logo tape and more tape never is a bad thing when it comes to shipping.  I'll let you know how that works.