Unboxing with...Noah's Box

Creating a memorable unboxing experience with Noah’s Box

Once an online fad, the unboxing experience has now affirmed its place as a serious branding strategy. Unboxing videos on YouTube are racking up millions of views, and more and more small businesses are waking up to the value it adds to the customer experience. Creating a memorable customer experience that makes your brand stand out is never easy, but starter kit company Noah’s Box has made their mark by using their custom tissue paper to curate a unique and cost-effective unboxing experience.

To offer a truly valuable product or service, a start-up business needs to have a firm sense what it’s aiming to address. For Moritz Braatz, the founder of Noah’s Box, the value proposition is simple. Most university students are leaving home for the first time, and they are starting from square one when it comes to the essentials a student needs to survive at uni. Noah’s Box aims to provide a solution by giving students, or anyone experiencing a big move, everything they need to kit out their kitchen or bedroom - all within the one box:

“I founded Noah's Box together with my co-founder Harvey. We both have worked in various eCommerce Startups here in London, where often an incredible amount of capital and effort is spent on performance marketing, branding and packaging. Instead of providing a truly innovative product, or trying to deliver genuine value and a memorable customer experience, they focus on optimizing their excessive marketing spend.”

“So, we set out to find a product that solves an actual problem, and that offers genuine value to our customer base. We decided to launch a Starter Kit for Students, including all of the essentials a student needs to hit the ground running at Uni.”

So-called ‘starter kits’ have flourished within the eCommerce marketplace. It’s an engaging way of presenting products, which makes them very compatible with unboxing experiences and social media marketing. The convenience they offer is also a major drawcard. However, this is often outweighed by products being poor-quality or consumers paying over the odds. If products can be sourced separately for a lower cost, then this doesn’t provide customers with a viable solution to their needs. It’s addressing this issue that gives Noah’s Box a major point of difference:

“For us, it's important to offer quality products with an affordable price tag. Because we bundle our products, we can offer them up to 40% cheaper than buying the individual products in a retail store or on Amazon. Over time, we want to extend our range of Starter Kits and become known as 'The Starter Kit Company' - removing the hassle of starting anything new and offering Kits at an unbeatable price point!”

Creating a cost-effective unboxing experience

When keeping prices low is at the forefront of their business strategy, Noah’s Box was faced with an obvious challenge when it came to how to create a memorable unboxing experience. Whilst custom packaging is an excellent strategy for brand storytelling, it can also be a major business expense. For this reason, Moritz had to think carefully about how to create an unboxing experience on a budget:

“We decided very early on not to have custom boxes. The cost of custom printing our outer and inner boxes would heavily increase the cost of our starter kits, and we would have to transfer those costs onto the consumer. However, most people who are buying our boxes are starting university, moving for a new job to an unfamiliar city, or have just moved to the UK from abroad. It's an emotional rollercoaster to start a new phase in your life, and we are aiming to make this unboxing experience still exciting without heavily increasing the costs for the end customer.”

For businesses either just starting out or undergoing a brand refresh, this is a common issue. Custom packaging for small businesses is an area still not widely served. Custom boxes in particular are one of the most expensive packaging options available, and so aren’t realistic for many businesses. Custom tissue paper however can be produced in much smaller runs at a lower cost, making it a budget-friendly option to curate the unboxing experience that Noah’s box envision for their customers.

Branding is also not their only consideration; with greater awareness amongst consumers about packaging waste, an unboxing which maximizes sustainable packaging materials was a high priority for Moritz. By being 100% recyclable and using only renewable soy-based inks, noissue custom tissue paper was the ideal solution:

“We are working towards using only sustainable packaging for our Starter Kits, such as recycled cardboard boxes or our sustainable custom tissue paper. One of the biggest challenges we are facing is that many items we are buying are packed multiple times, as they are mostly produced for direct to consumer in-store retail. Because of that, we are currently looking at sourcing our products close to the source to make sure that the packaging used is as minimal as possible.”

For more on how to create a memorable unboxing experience for your customer, check out the dedicated article on our blog!

Removing the barriers to custom packaging for small businesses

For small businesses, there are other barriers to custom packaging besides cost. A memorable design that reflects your brand identity is important, especially if you plan on sharing your packaging and your unboxing experience on social media! This is where branded packaging can become an intimidating prospect - if there is no one on your team with design expertise, it can feel off-limits. As a new start-up, this presented a challenge for Moritz and his team:

“Our team has a tech/product background and unfortunately, we do not have an in-house designer in the team yet. Therefore, we are trying to keep it simple and minimalistic when coming up with new designs or content. To make sure that everything we do align with our brand ethos and visual identity, we have written up a 'brand book' including all our design and brand guidelines such as colour codes or a guide how we communicate with our customers.”

At noissue, we don’t believe that eye-catching custom packaging should only be available to businesses with a full design team. For this reason we keep our online design tool nice and simple, with a wide variety of eye-catching templates to choose from. As long as you have your logo at the ready, it doesn’t matter whether you are a pro designer or a novice - you can still create the custom tissue paper, and have the unboxing experience, you desire for your business.

“We were searching for a simple solution to design and print our custom tissue paper. noissue's online platform makes it very easy to upload designs, and we were confident to place an order without the fear that we have chosen the wrong colours, accidentally cut-off the sides or anything similar. That the tissue paper is sustainable was an important factor when choosing noissue, and we are super happy with the end result, as the quality is astonishing!”