“We needed to triple capacity without tripling our footprint,” says Jordan Miles, Operations Director at NorthPeak Gifts. The team had two months before Q4 and a packaging mix that was wobbling under seasonal pressure. They turned to packola when it became clear that their current approach would choke during peak.
NorthPeak is a mid-sized e‑commerce brand in the U.S., shipping curated gift sets with cosmetics, snacks, and accessories. Volumes swing from 25–40k units a month, with 12–18 SKUs rotating by season. The baseline reject rate sat at 7–9%, and color drift across SKUs meant costly rework. Floor space was fixed. The brief: stabilize, not expand.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Instead of adding another line, the team reconfigured how they worked—standardized dielines, moved short-run work to digital printing, and created a split strategy for paperboard and wood packages. The bet was that a tighter process would beat brute capacity.
Company Overview and History
NorthPeak Gifts launched in 2016 and built its reputation on thoughtful curation and premium presentation. The packaging had to feel giftable—tactile finishes, clean typography, and sturdy structures that survive carrier handling. NorthPeak ships mostly in North America, with a fulfillment hub outside Austin, Texas, and a second seasonal site that opens in the Pacific Northwest for Q4 surges.
The product portfolio spans small cosmetics, glass jars, and artisanal snacks. Structurally, that calls for folding carton boxes for most SKUs and a small run of rigid wood boxes for corporate gifts. The question that kept resurfacing on the ops floor was practical: what are custom boxes when the SKU count shifts weekly? For NorthPeak, it meant repeatable dielines, fast changeovers, and finishes that don’t blow up cost.
The team organized packaging by run type—Short-Run and Seasonal were routed to Digital Printing on SBS paperboard; stable SKUs went Offset Printing when volumes justified plates. Finishes like Foil Stamping and Soft-Touch Coating were reserved for hero sets to protect margins while preserving perceived value.
Quality and Consistency Issues
Before the overhaul, the reject rate hovered around 7–9%. Color accuracy was the frequent culprit—ΔE readings drifted beyond 4–5 across reprints, especially on kraft variants. Registration issues showed up after long runs, and rework ate both labor and time. The problems compounded during seasonal spikes when more SKUs fought for time on press.
Changeover time between SKUs stretched to 45–60 minutes, driven by manual plate swaps, inconsistent preflight, and chasing color targets. That kind of downtime is workable in Long-Run contexts but punishing for Short-Run and On-Demand needs. Packaging for premium sets—especially custom flip top boxes—simply couldn’t afford color variance or panel misalignment.
Supply chain constraints added noise. Paperboard spec variability (coat weight, brightness) introduced shifts in ink laydown. The team had been juggling Water-based Ink for paper and UV Ink experiments for special effects without a unified color management approach. In short: too many variables, not enough control.
Solution Design and Configuration
NorthPeak designed a mixed approach. Short-Run folding carton moved to Digital Printing with G7-calibrated workflows to tighten ΔE within 2–3 across SKUs. They selected 18pt SBS for a reliable surface, kept Soft-Touch Coating for hero items, and introduced Spot UV on selected panels, keeping embellishments where they added perceived value without bloating unit cost.
The team split structures by intent: custom flip top boxes for core SKUs that needed neat closure and shelf presence; and custom wood boxes with logo for corporate gifting where tactile heft mattered. Wood branding used laser engraving for consistency, with limited Screen Printing in UV-LED Ink on darker stains when the mark needed extra pop.
The company partnered with packola’s custom box program to standardize dielines and consolidate finishing options under one roof. It wasn’t a silver bullet—engineering still had to validate glue flap tolerances and board caliper—but it reduced guesswork. Procurement liked a single spec sheet; production liked fewer surprises.
Pilot Production and Validation
The pilot ran for three weeks: five SKUs, two paperboard structures, one wood set. A preflight checklist was introduced to catch file prep issues, and press operators logged ΔE targets by SKU rather than by job batch. Early results showed color variance shrinking to within 2–3 ΔE for most panels after calibration.
NorthPeak’s procurement team did their homework and combed through packola reviews to gauge consistency across short runs. They also asked about a packola discount code for sample orders—which helped the team place test quantities without wrangling budget approvals for full runs. Small detail, but it made the pilot smoother.
Changeover time fell into the 25–35 minute window once dielines and color profiles were locked. First Pass Yield nudged upward from ~85% to the 92–94% band during the pilot. Here’s the catch: the wood sets took longer. Laser engraving introduced a bottleneck when stain variations appeared. The team added a stain check to incoming QC.
Quantitative Results and Metrics
Fast forward six months. Waste dropped by roughly 20–30% as reprints declined and scrap from color mismatch came down. Throughput lifted in the 10–15% range, driven by tighter changeovers and fewer mid-run adjustments. Not perfect, but enough to stabilize Q4 without adding floor space.
Color accuracy landed consistently inside a ΔE of 2–3 for most SKUs after G7 calibration. FPY settled between 92–94% across Short-Run lines. Changeover time averaged 28–32 minutes on paperboard after the preflight regimen. On environmental measures, CO₂ per pack improved by an estimated 8–12% due to lower scrap and fewer reprints. Payback is tracking at 12–18 months, depending on seasonal volume.
One practical win: custom flip top boxes held up better under fulfillment stresses once the board spec and glue systems were standardized. The team cut down on crushed corners and lid warping, which used to trigger returns on heavy sets. It’s mundane, but in e‑commerce, mundane saves money.
Lessons Learned
The turning point came when operations stopped chasing print effects and started chasing repeatability. Standardized dielines, locked color profiles, and a clean file pipeline mattered more than any single finish. Wood boxes looked great, but stain variability needs a tighter spec; laser is forgiving until it isn’t.
Trade-offs? Digital Printing carried slightly higher unit cost on some SKUs, but offset plates didn’t make sense for the velocity of changes. The team learned that what are custom boxes is less about the box itself and more about how design, procurement, and production agree on constraints—board grade, finish menu, and time-to-press. Without that shared playbook, each new SKU feels like a science experiment.
If you’re considering a similar path, pilot your most volatile SKUs first and get operators involved early in the color target discussion. Based on this project, NorthPeak will keep the split strategy and expand the standardized dieline library with packola templates. It’s not glamorous, but it’s the kind of steadiness production teams can live with.
