Custom printed shipping boxes can be a crucial investment for your small business. If you perfect your custom mailer boxes, you can ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty while improving your brand image and perceived brand value.

To ensure that your custom packaging design is on point, however, it’s best to request a box sample or prototype before placing your entire order. Even if you’re planning on ordering short-run custom boxes, a one-off prototype can help you catch any mistakes and perfect all the final touches before the packaging is sent off to customers

Ensure the Perfect Fit

One of the biggest benefits of custom printed boxes is the custom size and shape, perfectly fitting your products to reduce void fill and wasted space. To make this benefit worthwhile, however, you’ll need to ensure the box perfectly fits your product’s measurements.

It’s not always possible to send the product to your supplier for exact measurements, so it’s a wise choice to get a plain sample of your custom box before proceeding with your full order. This allows you to verify its measurements and ensure the product fits securely inside. 

If the measurements aren’t perfect, the risk of damage during transit increases, which can ultimately harm customer satisfaction rates and profits. Taking the small step of requesting a box sample can help eliminate this worry without significant additional cost.

Verify the Quality

Even if you’re using the most reputable custom wholesale box manufacturer in the country, quality discrepancies can still sometimes occur. Whether it’s caused by a breakdown in communication or differing color outputs from screen to print, the result can sometimes differ from the digital design.

If you want to ensure that your custom printed shipping boxes are exactly what you had in mind before producing them en masse, ask your box manufacturer for a box prototype. This will allow you to spot minor errors in artwork design and typography, color discrepancies, or logo placement. While these factors may not be a big deal to some, we understand that the details are crucially important to many small businesses, which is why we always recommend requesting a box sample for your custom packaging design.

Implement Last-Minute Changes

Another reason that box samples are so advantageous when ordering custom packaging design is that they give you a last-minute opportunity to correct errors, add finishing touches, and respond to customer feedback.

Even if the box looks and feels exactly as the designer intended, you may still want to add a photo here or text there once you have the final box design in hand. It also allows you to beta-test your boxes and respond to real customer feedback at a moment’s notice.

With box samples, you can have confidence that your custom printed shipping boxes are beautiful, high quality and will provide a premier unboxing experience for your customers. If your small business needs short-run samples to perfect its custom packaging design, visit the Build A Box website to use our free online box configuration tool. We can give you a free estimate for a range of quantities, and there’s never any minimum order quantity required. If you’d like design assistance to perfect your custom printed boxes, call (888) 406-1610 or fill out our contact form, and one of Build A Box’s design experts will be happy to help you through the process.