Every brand I've worked with has had the same blind spot.
Not the same product. Not the same market. The same blind spot. Packaging gets figured out after everything else is done. After the industrial design. After the branding. After the go-to-market plan is locked. Someone sends me a brief and the launch date is in eight weeks.
That sequencing is where the money goes.
What I keep seeing
I've worked inside packaging systems for Fitbit, Magic Leap, Cricut, Jabra, and a lot of brands you haven't heard of yet. Across all of them, the Fortune 500 and the startup doing their first run, the story is the same. Packaging was treated as a surface decision. A box. A label. Something to make the product look good at the moment of unboxing.
By the time I get involved, the structural decisions are already setting the cost of every unit they'll ever ship.
Here's what those decisions are actually touching:
How fast the line runs at the contract manufacturer
How many units fit on a pallet and what they're paying per shipment
How many touches the 3PL needs to fulfill a single order
How often product arrives damaged and what the return rate looks like
How much warehouse space the SKUs consume before they ever sell
Nobody made those choices thinking about any of that. They made them thinking about how the box looks.
What happened at Proclaim Health
When I came into Proclaim Health, their packaging cost was over $40 per unit. Their 3PL was logging over 100 individual touches to fulfill a single order.
The packaging wasn't broken in any obvious way. It just hadn't been designed as a system. It had been designed as a box.
We redesigned the structure with operations at the center. Packaging cost went to $11 per unit. Touches at the 3PL went from over 100 to 3.
Same product. Same 3PL. Same 3PL team. Different packaging system.
That $29 per unit and 97 fewer touches didn't appear from nowhere. They were always there, buried inside structural decisions nobody had thought to question.
I call this the Packaging Butterfly Effect. One structural choice, made early, ripples through production, fulfillment, freight, and margin for the entire life of the product. The flutter of a dieline decision in week two becomes a hurricane in your P&L by year two.
The conversation I try to move brands toward
The packaging conversation I walk into is almost always about aesthetics. Does it feel premium? Does it photograph well? Does it match the brand identity?
I'm not against those questions. But I've learned to ask different ones first.
How does this structure perform at 50,000 units? What does it cost to fulfill — not just to produce? How many times does a human touch this before it reaches a customer? What happens to this in a returns flow?
When you start there, the aesthetics sharpen too. Because you're designing something that actually works, and things that work tend to look like they do.
Where I start now
I built the Packaging Profit Recovery Program because I kept doing informal versions of it anyway. Every engagement started with me finding money the brand didn't know was missing. So I systematized it, a structured audit that maps cost leakage inside an existing packaging operation and puts a number on what fixing it is worth.
If you have a product line running right now, the inefficiency is already in there. It's findable. And it's usually larger than expected.
If you want to run one on your operation, start here.