How distinctive is your store's packaging?

All of my bags have the same logo, a frog. The frog is also on my outdoor signs, placed throughout the store announcing new product, and in all my advertising. And it's always in the same colors. I use a white bag with dark green lettering. It's identifiable because it is simple and the colors are bright. "Keep it simple, stupid," works. Don't fuss it up by putting too much on it: Some of the dark colors and gold just don't show up. This is a semi-tourist town, so people going back on the ferry see our recognizable bags and remember them. I don't have boxes printed up, I use a white gift box with a store sticker. Stickers are cheap, so I put them inside and outside. I sticker it as much as I can. We don't use imprinted giftwrap, tissue, or ribbons, but we do wrap all gifts. It brings the costs up, but it's better promotion than a newspaper ad.

It was a joke when we opened 25 years ago: I spent so much of my tiny loan on brown paper sacks. I was scared. I thought, at this rate I'm not going to have any inventory. But it was one of those things, the more you buy, the cheaper they get. It sure saved a lot of money. I got 5,000 of each size, and it took me about five years to use them all. We have kept the same brown kraft paper sack with the same logo ever since. We also use imprinted champagne-colored boxes with our name stamped in gold. Our giftwrap and ribbons aren't imprinted or in our color scheme, they change with the theme of the gift. Our wrap is very distinctive: We use clear cellophane on a Styrofoam base with filler. Packaging and giftwrap are very appreciated, and can make the sale: If someone has a choice of where to shop, they'll go where they know their wrapped gift will make an impression.

Our store's color scheme is hunter green and gold, so our gift boxes are hunter green with our logo stamped in gold foil. Our shopping bags are basically the same, but I couldn't get the smaller bags in hunter green, so we went with a beige parchment. We also have little oval seals with a black background and gold foil logo. We use those when we wrap an item that comes in its own box. And sometimes, when a price tag doesn't peel off well, we'll put a seal over the spot. We use several styles of giftwrap, and faux-raffia ribbon, with which we make bows with multiple loops or cut the ends to make a star. For people who don't want wrap, we tie gold raffia around the green box. We also put gift enclosure cards in gold with our logo on top. Especially if the product is in its own box, it's another way to know where the gift came from.

We use imprinted boxes with our name hot-stamped on them. We have two versions of our logo: one that spells our name across and one that stacks it. We also change the colors every time I reorder. Our store colors are copper, purple, and a green with a copper patina. Our first set of boxes was green with copper imprinting. The set we have now is regular kraft with purple metallic imprinting. I change the box colors because it's like gift-wrap: We don't want it always to look the same. We have a variety of labels and stickers in case we need to wrap a box that doesn't have our name on it. We also use imprinted ribbon: a soft silver gray with the copper imprint. Our bags with our name on them are similar. I want our customers, as well as people they pass on the street, to have a consistent image of the store.