Whenever I'm walking around the North End and I see a blue and white Mike's pastry box with the string, I reflect on how genius good branding and packaging can be.
Would you be able to speak to where the boxes are made? Is it one central location somewhere? I always assumed craft packaging was a pretty decentralized industry...especially the niche bakery/cafe market where transportation costs might break your margins on highly custom, low volume orders.
We work with a variety of factories in Southwestern Ontario, Canada, which is a big packaging manufacturing region. Packaging manufacturing is very fragmented - most factories are small-ish, like $10m in sales or less, often family-owned, several generations old, and in small towns. So depending on the exact size of order and special requirements, we'll work with one or several of our partner factories. For example.. the boxes might be printed in one location, then transported to another for metallic foil work, then transported back to the original factory to be die-cut and glued with a bunch of other identically-sized boxes we're making for other clients. We're always trying to make it more streamlined. Transportation isn't a huge cost -- raw materials are though, and labour, since a lot of what we do is set up major machinery to do quite small runs, such as lithographic printing presses. They take a lot of fine-tuning to get the colours and graphics perfect - and that's not a shorter process just because the total run is small.
Would you be able to speak to where the boxes are made? Is it one central location somewhere? I always assumed craft packaging was a pretty decentralized industry...especially the niche bakery/cafe market where transportation costs might break your margins on highly custom, low volume orders.