New Lightweight, Strong & Green Packaging for Custom Dress Shirts from Lewis and Taylor

Online, April 29, 2013 (Newswire.com) - Lewis and Taylor are pleased to announce a new style of packaging for their made to measure shirts. The packaging is lightweight, yet sturdy and also has green credentials as it is made from re-cycled material. The new packaging lowers both the shipping cost and the carbon footprint whilst still protecting the product. Looking at the needs of their customers, the team at Lewis and Taylor have spent time developing what they consider the optimum custom dress shirt box. The aim was to create packaging that was tough, lightweight and presented the shirt to our customers in the same condition it left the workshop. To accomplish this, a new top opening pillow-box style carton has been developed using recycled corrugated kraft paper.

The primary function of packaging is to protect the product. The custom dress shirt industry needs the packaging to be as light as possible, as customers usually receive their products via airmail. Within the industry a variety of packaging is used, from traditional boxes, standard pillow-box designs through to a basic padded envelope. The team at Lewis and Taylor felt none of the existing solutions were ideal for custom dress shirts so they decided to create something new.

As Ed Rossiter the CEO of Lewis and Taylor points out, "we used to use a standard rigid carton for our shirts. Although our customers were always happy with the quality of packaging, the additional airfreight costs just seemed unnecessary to us, so we decided to develop something better".

Starting with a need to replicate the benefits of a rigid card box with a lid, the team looked at the pillow-box style of packaging as it offers a strong yet lightweight solution. But the basic pillow-box was rejected because of two major drawbacks for dress shirts. Firstly when a pillow-box style package gets over a certain size the single layer of cardboard typically used is no longer stiff enough to stop it collapsing at the centre. Given the size of a dress shirt, this invariably happens, and so compounds the second issue where the customer needs to pull out the shirt which often ruins the integrity of the product especially if the box has been crushed.

This led the team to re-design a standard pillow box to meet the needs of a dress shirt. A large fluted kraft material was used as it not only offers greater stiffness but it is also light. The flutes also add strength around the area where the collar is positioned helping to ensure it isn't crushed during transit. The next issue to overcome was the need to pull-out the product. Lewis and Taylor have solved this by making the design top opening with self locking tabs to ensure it stays closed during transit. This package is then placed into a large manila paper envelop for shipment, which Ed Rossiter comments, "We are pleased with the result of this team effort for a new custom dress shirt package design and although using a paper envelope does cost a little more than a plastic mailer we feel having a 100% natural product including this new lightweight packaging allows our customers to design their products knowing they are also being green."