Love the ShotPut crew. Some of the hardest working founders I've met.

Admittedly we were damn pretty terrible on the shipping and fulfillment side of our business early on and they've been a huge help getting everything figured out for us.

You definitely want to work with these guys.

Working with Pakible is phenomenal we've recommended all our customers who want custom boxes to use their service! And we already handle their fulfillment.

How do your customers handle inserts in your boxes? Seems that many products need some really custom insert to keep from rattling around.

Generally we call inserts: marketing messages companies put in each shipment.

There's another material called dunnage i.e. fill that is placed such as air packs, bubble wrap, paper, cardboard, mushroom (yes a product made from mushrooms!), etc. are used to keep the product tight.

Another method is to use a smaller box which cuts down on both shipping costs as well as is a more secure way of securing products.

Jason is on point, he's pretty much answered me back within 1-5 minutes every time. Congrats on the TC article!

Is that the only reason? Or will there still be some sort of veto power by YC partner(s) to opt out of the future round in extraordinary cases?

As happy customers & friends of the company I'm sad to hear this news today. I wish everyone on the team all the best.

I'm curious to one day read a post mortem on the company, and especially about these last few months.

Our last appointment is scheduled for Monday.

Thank you Homejoy.

We love Teespring's bags.

We're trying to find a good way to make these available to customize at low volume.

Can't wait to see!

I think the author focuses too much on outlier examples (Apple, Oculus).

Great packaging and branding has a serious impact for companies today than previous years. More people sell online then ever before (shopify, etsy, etc) and there's no longer that brick-n-mortar experience you typically go through when buying your products in a physical shop. You buy online now and then that item is shipped to you.

In many ways, the packaging IS the brick-n-mortar experience for customers when they receive your product. No one gets excited about seeing a generic brown box on their doorstep. They get excited about the fact it has Amazon Prime printed on the side with the branded tape. "Yes! My what-you-call-it just arrived!".

This is the same experience that companies like Bonobos, Birchbox, Naturebox, Teespring, etc deliver. Its branded extremely well and they all care very much about delivering an extension of their brand to someones doorstep. In the case of a lot of subscription box companies, the products inside are relatively cheap to source. A large cost IS the packaging because they are delivering on an experience.

Try the World's box is fucking amazing (www.trytheworld.com). It feels good opening and seeing what's in store for you this month. I'm sure the products inside cost next to nothing, but its not just about that.

The author seems to make a case that Apple spends way too much on packaging (not surprising considering Steve Jobs cared about every detail inside and out). Then he uses Oculus as an example of really generic packaging that people go amazeballs for. Uh, yea we're talking about a 1 in a million type product that sold for billions, and did you see their DK1 packaging? It came in a freaking suitcase basically.

I think these are both pretty outlier cases, and the norm is that great packaging can really polish a company and expand their brand and product.

This is what we care about deeply at Pakible (www.pakible.com), the company I founded to help any company make beautiful packaging for their brands.

Yes, typically it takes a long time to create packaging and is very costly, and that part I will admit is true. But that is also one of the things we are changing about the industry with Pakible. To not have to worry about the construction, sourcing it, designing it. We help people do that so they can focus on the rest of their business.

1) We handle this offline with the customer. The prototype 3D/2D editors we're developing right now should make it a lot easier in the future.

2) ai, eps, svg, png, jpg, pdf... anything really. But preferably vector graphics (will give best print resolution)

Awesome service and dead simple to use. I got 10 boxes made in no time at all. :-)

it hasn't been a problem. thanks for your concern though.

in case you're curious:

The name we selected was "Packable" = packaging + enable/capable/etc.

But the domain was already taken. We searched for alterations of that until we landed on pakible.com being available.

I was not even aware "Paki" was a slur that refers to Pakistani individuals and never would have made the connection and I'm doubtful the average person would either. It's clearly a packaging company and so the mind makes that connection when reading the name.

planning to launch a new style each week. perhaps I should add a voting option for the next style to add to the site

agreed. we have a prototype of that feature using three.js to give you a 3D look at your packaging.