“We had eight months to roll out 40 new SKUs across the EU, and the packaging couldn’t be the bottleneck,” said Marta Silva, Operations Manager at Aurora Beauty. “We needed rigid gift boxes that felt premium, assembled cleanly, and traveled well.” The team brought **packola** into the early prototyping rounds to move fast without gambling on production stability.
Here’s the reality we were facing: waste sat around 10–12% on similar projects, changeovers idled crews for 40–50 minutes, and color drift across substrates triggered rework we couldn’t afford. E-commerce was growing, retail was coming back, and seasonal timing mattered more than ever.
We made a simple bet: lean on offset printing for wrap quality, lock down color management to ΔE within 2–3, and standardize inserts and dividers to limit variability. It wasn’t perfect on day one—rarely is—but the metrics started to tell a different story within weeks.
Company Overview and History
Aurora Beauty is a Lisbon-based cosmetics brand founded in 2014. Today, their portfolio spans skincare, fragrance minis, and curated gift sets. The packaging mix covers rigid boxes for premium lines, corrugated for DTC shipping, and labels for travel kits. Historically, they outsourced structural design ad hoc, which made procurement faster but created headaches in quality control and repeatability.
By early spring, the plan called for 120 active SKUs with 40 seasonal variants. Rigid boxes were the showpiece, and e-commerce meant the shipping experience mattered. For DTC, the team assessed custom printed shipping boxes wholesale to consolidate freight across markets while keeping unboxing consistent. Retail partners demanded shelf presence without over-complicating assembly on the line.
There was a strategic pivot away from one-off structures toward a kit-of-parts approach: shared wrap specs, standardized board thickness, and common insert families for lipsticks, droppers, and mini fragrance vials. It sounds dry, but from a production manager’s chair, that’s how you avoid late-stage surprises.
Solution Design and Configuration
We chose Offset Printing for wrap sheets over 1.5–2.0 mm rigid board, with Soft-Touch Coating for a matte, tactile feel. Spot UV picked out logotypes, and a light Foil Stamping on holiday editions kept the brand distinct without fragile edges. Wraps stayed on FSC-certified paperboard; color control targeted ΔE ≤ 3 using a G7-calibrated workflow. Short sample lots ran Digital Printing to vet color and copy in parallel with structural testing.
Now to the practical question we kept hearing: how to customize inserts and dividers for custom cosmetic rigid boxes? We mapped each SKU to its primary container family, then built die-lines with 0.5–1.0 mm clearance per cavity to account for labeled diameters and tolerances. Where glass met potential vibration, we used EVA foam (35–45 shore) with chamfered edges to reduce scuff, and locked inserts with two-point glue plus score lines for easy assembly. Travel tests included a 1 m drop and 96-hour vibration simulation to catch any rattle before scale-up.
Dividers followed a modular grid, cut from 400–500 gsm board with precise score depths to avoid frayed edges. For kits featuring small charms, we trialed a premium variant alongside custom wooden jewelry boxes for gifting bundles; the wood option was reserved for limited runs where weight and cost could be justified, while the paperboard dividers carried the mainline volume.
The turning point came when the brand partnered with packola during the prototyping phase. The team skimmed packola reviews to gauge consistency on small lots, then evaluated packola boxes specs: wrap GSMs, lamination choices, and standard die sets. It wasn’t just about price; we needed predictable assembly—less variance means smoother shifts and fewer calls at 2 a.m.
Quantitative Results and Metrics
Color held steady: ΔE hovered around 2–3 across wrap lots, which kept approvals tight and avoided rework. First Pass Yield landed at 93–95% on the rigid lines; previous projects had lived in the 86–89% band. Waste moved down from roughly 10–12% to 5–7%, mostly through insert standardization and cleaner glue points. Changeovers averaged 25–35 minutes after we locked common die sets; earlier programs sat closer to 40–50 minutes. Throughput reached 1,800–2,000 boxed sets per shift in peak weeks.
Quality tracking told the same story. ppm defects trended from 200–300 down to 90–120 once we tightened divider tolerances and improved score-line training. Not a miracle—just control. Payback Period on tooling and process changes penciled at 12–14 months, depending on seasonality. We kept EU 1935/2004 and EU 2023/2006 compliance in check with material declarations and migration testing for any finish near product contact.
There were bumps. Early lipstick cavities ran a hair wide; the elation of fast assembly turned into a rattle on vibration tests. We switched to a denser EVA and brought cavity clearance down by 0.3 mm. Another trade-off: more intricate dividers add 20–30 seconds of assembly per unit, which we offset by batching lines and avoiding bespoke tweaks mid-run. For DTC, we kept a lane open for custom printed shipping boxes wholesale to synchronize kitting. If you’re weighing your next rollout, loop in **packola** early—their prototyping cadence helped us catch problems while they were still cheap.
