The primary pack is the bottle or jar. Everything else in the outer carton is secondary packaging, and on a first order it is where budgets quietly overrun, because it is quoted late and it is mostly fixed cost per position rather than per unit.
| Primary pack | The bottle, jar, tube or airless chamber that holds the fill. Stock mould, no tooling fee. |
| Closure | Cap, pump, sprayer, dropper or disc-top. On an airless pack the pump is part of the assembly, not an add-on. |
| Primary label or decoration | Silk-screen, hot stamp, frosting, UV coating or a roll-fed label. See decoration. |
| Legal panel | Mandatory statements per destination market — product name, function, ingredient list, net content, batch, responsible person, country of origin, precautions. The ingredient list and the mandatory wording belong on the pack; the language set is decided by the markets you ship to. |
| Secondary carton | The printed folding carton, where the product has one. Optional for many pharmacy and refill formats, expected in most retail and e-commerce channels. |
| Shipper | The corrugated outer that protects the units in transit. Priced by board grade and by the number of units per shipper. |
Three things, in order. Number of versions: every language, every market and every size is a separate print run with its own setup. A five-market launch with five legal panels costs materially more than one market with one panel. Colour count: the same logic as primary decoration — each additional ink is an additional pass. Board and finish: a soft-touch laminated carton with metallic foil costs several times a plain board carton, and the difference is usually larger than the difference between the two bottles it might hold.
Label instead of print, where the channel allows. If the label is what carries the variable copy, you can run one pack across several markets and reprint only the label. This is the standard answer for an export-heavy range.
Put everything that is the same on every unit once, and everything that varies on the smallest possible surface. The batch code, the expiry and the market-specific wording all belong in one variable block that is applied last — layout the pack so that changing it changes nothing else.
The documents that travel with a production order — COA, MSDS, formula sheet, pack spec — are listed on the how we manufacture page rather than repeated here.
Send us the fill and we will come back with the pack, the decoration and one FOB price covering both, within 24 hours. 3134 moulds are in production — there is no tooling fee at any size.
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