HOW TO GUIDE - PACKAGING

Packaging is a simple way to make your business stand out. As I customer I love to receive my orders in cute packing and it makes me feel like a lot of care and effort has gone into my order. When I first opened my Etsy shop my packaging was very ordinary and, quite frankly, boring. But over time I have changed and personalised my packaging and I'm going to explain about it a little more in this blog.  

I'm a big fan of metals and metallics and I think that they work well with my steampunk theme. All of my items are bubble wrapped before being packaged into a cute gold and white striped envelope. As well as looking nice, this is also a simple and quick way of packaging when you have a lot of orders. I used to wrap my orders up in brown kraft paper like a Christmas present but this just wasn't practical when I had a lot to do. The bags are folded and secured with a Thank You sticker. 

My larger and more fragile items are packaged in a box which is wrapped with twine. There are so many different varieties of twine and it is an easy thing to adapt for different seasons; red and green at Christmas, orange and black and Halloween. I have slowly built up a large collection of twine - I seem to acquire the stuff quicker than I can use it. 

In my shop I also sell a variety of Alice in Wonderland themed jewellery and I recently came up with this idea. Any Alice inspired jewellery comes on a playing card and is again packaged in a white and gold striped bag. 

Since I sell jewellery which can be fragile I have to mark all of my envelopes as FRAGILE. I used to use fragile tape but thought this was absolutely ghastly and really didn't fit in with my handmade and vintage theme. I then explored getting a fragile stamp but all of the nice, handmade ones were out of my budget. Now I have settled for doing a hand drawn FRAGILE design on my envelopes. This design varies from order to order and I hope it conveys to my customers the effort that I put into their order. I also secure my envelopes with Washi Tape. At the moment I have a steampunk themed tape covered in old watches in a vintage style. However I am looking at getting different tapes for Alice in Wonderland orders and vintage orders. 
EDIT - Since writing this I have investiged in a gorgeous little Fragile stamp, which I'm sure you will be seeing in a future blog!