The retail pack

In garments the pack is a polybag and a carton. In home textiles the pack is part of the product, because the product is sold unopened off a shelf and the only thing your customer can judge is the box.

Decide the retail pack early and cost it as a line. A printed box, a PVC or non woven pouch, a header carded sleeve, a ribbon tie: each is a different cost and a different lead time, and print for packaging is ordered separately from the goods and often from a different supplier. Late artwork on a box has held up more home textile shipments than late artwork on cloth.

The pack carries legal information. Fibre content, care symbols, the size marking, the country of origin and your barcode, all in the format the selling market requires and, where it applies, in the required languages. This is the same body of rules as step 10 and it lands on the pack, so approve the two together rather than separately.

Then the carton, which is your freight cost. Pieces per carton, carton dimensions, gross and net weight, and the carton markings. Home textiles are bulky, so how tightly the goods are packed decides how many containers you pay for. Ask for the carton specification in the quotation rather than after it, and put the cube into the freight sum at step 8.

Approve a physical pack, with a real product inside it, before bulk. A pack approved from a flat artwork file is not approved either.

What a bad answer looks like: “standard export cartons” with no pieces per carton, no dimensions and no gross weight, so the cube cannot go into the freight sum and the container count stays a guess until the goods are packed.