Cut to the Core

Amazon Commits to Solve Our Wrap Rage

Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO, of Amazon, the online retailer, has launched the Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging initiative. This program is Amazon’s answer to “customer wrap rage,” the frustration experienced in the effort to take a new purchase out of its store packaging.

 Packaging is designed to help deter items from being stolen and to ensure that items travel unharmed. Plastic hermetically sealed packaging and wire twisty ties are very effective in meeting these packaging objectives. However, these items also make it hard for the consumer to get to the product without using specialty tools such as wire clippers.

Amazon is working with suppliers to create packaging that will be more environmentally friendly and easier to open without compromising the original objectives of protecting products from theft and damage during shipment.

Nineteen Holiday Season best sellers come in the new packaging and Amazon is committed to working with suppliers for as long as it will take to offer its entire catalog in Frustration-Free Packaging.

To see others deal with “wrap rage” and to share your favorite video or photograph of a “battle with the wrap,” access the Amazon page “The Gallery of Wrap Rage.”

 

What “Buyer Rage” Could Your Organization Solve? How can you align your competencies to find and execute a solution to a shared product or service frustration?

Chloe's Design Tips

For over thirty years, guest blogger, Chloe Tyner has been a typographer and graphic designer.

Since 1990, she has worked as a freelance graphic designer and consultant. Her experience with advertising agencies, marketing consultants, web designers, writers, illustrators and printers has helped her achieve a comprehensive overview of print materials and how to achieve champagne results on a budget.

In the last few years, her trusty Mac laptop has allowed her to continue the work she enjoys while accommodating her true passion: travel. This past summer she worked from a tent, on a mountain, on an island in the Caribbean.

Plan the layout of your design to suit your marketing campaign.

Stop and think. How do you plan to distribute the piece? This is one of the first things I ask any client on any print job. It doesn’t matter if you have a million beautifully designed self-mailing brochures, if there’s not adequate space for the mailing address, a business mailing imprint, or a stamp.

Make sure one of the first things that you address in your design is your means of distributing the piece. Are you going to mail it out as a direct-mail piece? Put it in a number 10 envelope? Bind it in a three-ring binder? Hand it out at a conference? Ask yourself if your design suits your purpose. If it’s a mailer, does it comply with U.S. Postal regulations? If it’s a multi-page piece, how do you plan to keep your pages together? If you plan to bind it, did you leave space along the left-hand side or the top of the page for the binding?