When we were launching Challky we knew that in order for us to grow organically (without spending a fortune on advertisement) we needed to exceed our customer expectations. The logic is simple — if you can manage to exceed customer expectations they will tell their friends about your company and your sales will increase. That’s an ideal situation and that’s what we wanted to achieve.

There are many different strategies that you can use to exceed your customer expectations, but today we’d like to tell you how we achieved it through our custom packaging design.

Before we go any further, try to remember when was the last time you were truly impressed with the packaging design of the product you’ve purchased online? Most likely it was a long time ago (if at all), since most companies today use a standard craft box to send products to their customers. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, but I think that we can all agree that in today’s highly competitive world little details can make a huge difference for the success of the company or a startup. That’s why when designing our T-shirt package we wanted to create a unique unboxing experience that would put a smile on our customer faces and hopefully make them share their experience with their friends.

There were three things that we wanted to accomplish with our product packaging design:

Surprise & delight our customers; Encourage our customers to share information about our product on social media; Increase repeat purchases.

Let’s start with our first and most important objective: to surprise and delight our customers.

After thinking about the solution for about a week we finally came up with an idea which both of us seemed to like — we decided to incorporate hand-written personal messages directly into our packaging. You don’t see personal hand-written messages very often these days, thus we thought that by integrating it directly into our package design we could surprise and create emotional connection with our customers.

Although we’ve just launched our project we have already received numerous emails from our customers who said that they really liked the personal message we sent them:

One of our customers was so excited by the whole experience she even took her time to get back to us and sent us a text message via phone:

We’ll definitely continue to write personal messages to all of our customers (even though it takes quite a bit of time and effort) because we strongly believe that it will definitely pay off in the long run.

Let’s move on to our next objective: to encourage our customers to share information about our product on social media.

It has been proven again and again that recommendations by other customers significantly influence our purchasing behaviour, especially if the recommendation is coming from a friend or someone close. That’s why we decided to integrate a special instruction consisting of four easy steps into our packaging that asks our customers to share a photo in their new Challky T-shirt with their friends on social media:

Finally, our last objective was: to increase repeat purchases from our existing customers.

That’s a pretty good objective, there’s no doubt about it. Every business owner wants to have repeated purchases from his/her clients and we wanted it too. That’s why we’ve decided to incorporate a special promo code for a 20% discount on the next purchase inside of the package. Hence, increasing the chances that our customers will come back in the future or share the code with their friends who might also be interested in purchasing our products.