Hobby & Craft Forums

soapitup wrote:That might work Nickie, you'll have too let me know how you get on with that, another thought I had was using fabric, they come in some great colours, patens etc and you can still add some ribon and labels. I think I may go to Dunhelm Mill today and buy a sample then I can roughly work out ow much it would cost per soap to wrap, and I guess I can use craft glue to stick it, we have a craft shop near here as well so they should sell craft glue (whatever the difference is)

Anyway let me know If you think fabic could be suitable.

Just work out the time it takes to cut fabric - wrap soap (affix label) tie with ribbon - then work out how many you could do in an hour! Probably work out more expensive than the soap:)

Just Soaps wrote:Just work out the time it takes to cut fabric - wrap soap (affix label) tie with ribbon - then work out how many you could do in an hour! Probably work out more expensive than the soap:)

Yea thanks for that back to the drawing board then I guess, keeping the costs low need to be a priority but don't want to skimp on look / quality. However as you said I need to work out how much time it takes to wrap each soap, not just how much the materials cost.

I think Jane's point is very valid - cost out your time and effort for all parts of the packaging process. How many wrappers you can cut, how many bars you can wrap, how many embellishments you can make.. once you know how many per hour, you can combine the lot to see what the real cost is... pre cut pre made stuff may seem expensive until you do a real price comparison.. if you can only do 10 complete bars per hour, thats 60p per bar in time alone on minimum wage.

Obviously if you are only making ands warapping 30 bars a month it will quite possibly be cheap(er) to make your own.. but then that is "hobby" rather than business perhaps..

As for what/how to wrap.. well, the brown paper/kraft paper/corrugated card is a very safe bet - it is loaded with all the right signals - environmental, hand crafted, untainted and so on.. but equally, it is "so" safe everybody uses it! there is nothing wrong with jumping on the bandwagon after all if it aint broke dont fix it.. but I think there's a trick to be made here by finding an alternative that distinguishes your product from all the other brown box/brown paper ones..

I quite liked the jazzy wallpapery ones nickie posted a pic of .. reminded me of indonesian woodblock prints, and handmade paper.. I would be drawn to those like a magpie! - though I bet many handmade papers are not colourfast and would need to be interlined..

Another issue with your wrappers is to make your bars a certain size so that you get an exact number of wrappers from a sheet - if you throw away 10% of your wrapper you throw away 10% of the money too.

The design below is a great one, that has brown underneith with a more colourful label around it, though spent all day looking for soap wrapping supplies and found nothing... so there is either no sites out thier selling what I am after, or I am just not using the right keywords for my searches, either way this is driving me nuts.

That exactly what I'm looking for Shane- absolutely perfect! I'm defo going to have a look into brown paper and getting flyers printed in the nearest size to wrap around like that and just glue then with a dab of a glue gun- very inexpensive and will look great and dispense with the need for stickers of any sort!

If you have any luck with suitable flyers that we can use will you give me the details please

such a "pure thought"

Leanne would be delighted to know!

Nickie wrote:That exactly what I'm looking for Shane- absolutely perfect! I'm defo going to have a look into brown paper and getting flyers printed in the nearest size to wrap around like that and just glue then with a dab of a glue gun- very inexpensive and will look great and dispense with the need for stickers of any sort!

But Shaun thinks brown paper is cheap!

Shaun? Do you mean Shane? Who's Leanne?

Nickie wrote:Shaun? Do you mean Shane? Who's Leanne?

At "pure thoughts"