Subscription Box Answers

Let's talk about custom boxes (with Courtney Hubbard)

• Liam Brennan

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In this episode of Subscription Box Answers, I am sitting down with Courtney Hubbard, the Operations Manager for BoxUp. BoxUp specializes in providing custom boxes for various subscription box companies.

Courtney shares her advice on creating the perfect custom box to make your brand stand out and explains how their service works.

If you want to place an order, here is an affiliate link that will get you 10% off: https://go.boxup.com/liam.

If you have a question you want answered on the show, make sure you head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com and join the free Facebook group to post your question there.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Subscription Box Answers with your host, liam Brennan. You're no rubbish, no crap. Straight to the point podcast with real, actionable tips, real strategies and insights from the industry which will help you start and grow your own successful subscription box business. You ask the questions, you ask the questions, you ask the questions. Liam gives the answers. It's as simple as that.

Speaker 2:

Hello and welcome everybody to a brand new episode of Subscription Box Answers. I hope you're having a really good day. Today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Courtney Hubbard from BoxUp. How are you, Courtney, Good?

Speaker 3:

How about you?

Speaker 2:

I'm great. Thanks very much for agreeing to jump on the podcast. I know there are a lot of listeners who will find value in this, because they may be in the early stages of setting up their box and they're looking for packaging tips, or they may want to advance and switch to custom boxes. So before we jump into it, do you want to tell the listeners a bit about BoxUp?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, first I guess I'll kind of introduce myself. I'm Courtney, as Liam mentioned, and I'm from Indiana. I've been born and raised here, growing up as an Indiana University fan and an Indiana State fan. I have a few rescued animals a dog named Indy and a cat named Yogi and I'm a local high school coach here in the area for girls soccer at the high school level. So I've been with BoxUp for about seven or eight years. I've been with BoxUp since we've started, so I've kind of gotten the chance to do every type of job here at BoxUp and really watch us grow and got to interact with customers and learn and learn about what our customers want. Boxup is a custom printed box manufacturer who produces standard sizes and we're also now dabbling into tape and poly mailers and hopefully some other new products coming soon.

Speaker 2:

Very good, and I never knew that that you were a coach for girls soccer.

Speaker 3:

Do you follow English soccer or football Barely barely like, if it's on, I'll watch it, but I'm not a fan necessarily of any, uh, english team. I'm more a fan, maybe, of players when, um, I know about them and the world cup comes on or something like that. I've actually traveled in women's soccer. I've traveled to the last three women's world cups, um, in canada, paris, new zealand well, that's right.

Speaker 2:

And the world? Well, the men's world cup that's in the us, isn't it? It is yeah, it's in the us next time very good, and we try and head to some games myself. Um so what? What would your daily job be in box up?

Speaker 3:

So my title is operations manager and it's just kind of coordinating between all the different aspects of our business marketing, sales, production, website and really keeping BoxUp moving and improving and listening to customers and how can we incorporate that, not only from a new product standpoint but from yeah, what do they need? What do we need to add? How do we satisfy customers as far as turn time and print quality? Just kind of coordinating everything between the customer and the business.

Speaker 2:

Cool, and would subscription boxes make up a good proportion of your business?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, subscription box customers are a big portion of our business, just because of the natural fit between what they need, which is a shipping box, and their also need to stand out amongst other subscription boxes in their branding and in their marketing. And that's kind of where custom printing comes into play.

Speaker 2:

Very cool. So for me we obviously we have a dog subscription box and we actually used a. It was a relatively plain box at the start and we just had our logo printed on the front and our main thing we were looking for we obviously we were looking for quality, but we were looking to keep our margin as high as possible, especially at the start where you don't necessarily have them economies of scale to go and invest in really expensive um boxes. Do you offer any kind of plain boxes as well?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, we actually offer plain white boxes. They're unprinted and they're blank. We actually just launched those about a month ago. We also offer tape. So kind of a good stepping stone is, if you know you just need a shipping container, you know you just need a shipping container, we you can buy the plain blank boxes as a little step up. You can go plain white boxes with maybe some tape on the outside. We're hoping to add stickers soon. So tape, a sticker is kind of a good step into the branded direction. And then eventually, when you've got the economies of scale, scale or if the marketing of full color printing is really important to your personal brand, then you go into full color print, whether one sided print or outside and inside print.

Speaker 2:

Yes, that's the part that I usually see a lot of new subscription box owners go down. So, in regards to custom printing, if they do get at the stage where it's time to basically do that, do you have any design recommendations for that?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so I guess that comes from a few different parts. First off, they can design. Our customers can design on our website in a few different paths. One is downloading a template, where they can then take that template to Canva if they're more comfortable there, or they can take it to a professional graphic designer if they want to go find one and then come back onto our website and one-click upload back in. Or we've created a path where they can go and find pre-made design templates, and these pre-made design templates have suggestions on where to put your logo, where to put text, where to put your social media graphics, and then has a really nice background pattern that the customer can choose to add their own colors and kind of add their own flair. But it gives them a good starting point if they don't want to start from completely scratch. We have a couple hundred templates in that template library that they can choose from and they can find their business sector or maybe what feel that they want. Do they want a solid background, a geometric background, a holiday background? And yeah, they can go from there and then they can make any edits they want.

Speaker 3:

And then the third path is, of course, starting from completely scratch, right, a completely blank box in the editor where we provide text and shapes and you know tools that the customer can use to design their box. They would upload their own assets like logo and you know if they have certain graphics or colors or whatever, they can upload all of those. So that's kind of how they can design. As far as tips on what I would say, I would say definitely know what you're wanting to base it off of before you begin. The customer very likely has a website and you want to align the website with the box branding because you need them to act as one. When you're designing in the editor, it's best if you know what your CMYK code is. A CMYK code is just what a customer's color code is using cyan, magenta, yellow and black and that's going to be what's used best for printing. Other color codes that they might have, like RGB, are for on the screen and won't match exactly in any type of print material.

Speaker 2:

Okay, it really sounds like you make it as easy as possible for the customer to really design a nice box. I have heard that about your service on your website, that you make it just really, really handy to do, which is great. As far as order times go, if somebody wants to put in an order for some boxes and they want to get some samples first, what would you recommend? What are your lead times?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so that's one of the main points that we're kind of known for in the industry. We have really low lead times. Customers can choose as low as four days to order. We have three different production methods a rush, an express and an economy date. The rush will be about four and the economy will be about 10, and then the express will be around seven, so they can choose what they want, and that way you know if you're in a pinch we can still help you, but if you're a really good planner, you can save money by ordering ahead.

Speaker 3:

As far as order quantities go, we sell as low as 12. And then we I mean any amount you can imagine we sell up into very high quantities. What we also try to do is we make it really easy to see your box in person before having to order more than one, and so we actually offer free proof to all customers, which is just your design and a quantity of one in your hands, to your door. You would just want to get online and chat with our live chat team and ask them for that, and they'll provide you with that code.

Speaker 2:

Cool. During COVID or even recently, we ran into some issues with our boxes Pretty much. It was harder to get boxes Now we're obviously in Ireland and we ended up like switching box provider a few times because even some companies that we're working with for a long time they were running into issue. Did you have any issues internally with source and cardboard or anything?

Speaker 3:

During COVID.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, or even like recently enough, because I have heard that a few box suppliers not even with us, but throughout the US as well were struggling with lead times and stuff.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, actually we never really had to move out our lead times. We have really good relationships with our raw material suppliers and I think that that really helped us to make sure that we were always supplied with what we needed to meet the turn times promised to our customers. So thankfully, that's not something that we really ran into. Whether that's COVID or recently, we've been able to keep our turn times low and be able to hold up to our promised delivery dates.

Speaker 2:

That's brilliant. That's really good. Do you only ship to the US or do you ship worldwide?

Speaker 3:

Currently we ship to the US and Canada. If someone was to ship worldwide, we would ship to a freight forwarder that they would set up and the freight forwarder would forward it to them.

Speaker 2:

Okay, that's really good to know. Well, look, thanks very much for coming on today's episode of Subscription Box Answers. We do have a special offer for the listeners and I'm going to put a link into the show notes. It's basically an affiliate link that the people in BoxUp were really good to create for me, and you get 10% off your first order and I'll put that in the show notes. If anybody wants to reach out and they have any questions, where should they go?

Speaker 3:

If anybody has any questions, you can find us on BoxUpcom. If you would like to email us, you can also email info at Boxupcom. The code that Liam is referring to is Liam10, and it's for 10% off, and that would be great to use on any type of quantity order that you purchase. I would also encourage everybody, if they haven't tried us out before, to really try us out first with that proof code that I discussed earlier, by asking our chat team what that current proof code is and being able to see one box in hands before you commit fully to, you know, 12 or more, just because it is your brand that you're talking about and you want to make sure everything is right.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, definitely, definitely. Well, look, we will be back next week at the exact same time. If you have a question you want answered on the show, make sure you head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom, join the free facebook group and post your question there. We'll chat to you next week. Bye.