If you get a kit from us, it is highly likely to arrive looking something like this:
The box on the left is, indeed, a purpose-made box specifically chosen to ship our kits, and it’s wrapped in a tape that we’ve specifically chosen to inform the recipient that they’re about to receive a Ploopy.
It’s also filled with packing material that might be considered “garbage”.
The box on the right is, in some respects, even more ramshackle: it’s the box in which all of our filaments are shipped to us. The packing material is the wrapper that was once wrapped around the filament.
It would not be inaccurate to say that a significant number of parcels that we ship out are padded with materials that would normally be headed straight for the landfill.
So, why do we do this?
Many of our manufacturing processes produce quite a bit of waste. A perfect example is in the picture above: the pink foam.
We cut foams in-house to produce parts for our Headphones. The sheets this foam arrives in is square, and we cut circles out of it. That produces quite a bit of waste.
The foam is a high-quality, sturdy foam. It dampens vibrations extremely well (which is what we use it for in our designs). In short, it makes excellent packing material.
This is just one example of quite a few processes in our shop that produce waste. The materials are usually of excellent quality. Using them as shipping material is a great way of preventing them from being wasted entirely.
The filament boxes are another great example. For every four kits we ship out, we go through a roll of filament. That’s a lot of boxes. These boxes are practically perfect in every respect for shipping, except that they’re branded with eSun’s logo.
That doesn’t really matter to me. In my opinion, reusing these is a great way of extending the life of these otherwise unusable materials. It is also a good way of reducing our consumption of new, single-use materials that would soon be headed for the landfill.
Another reason we do this has to do with costs.
Filament boxes, scraps from our manufacturing processes, and more are already here, in our shop, ready to go. Using them costs us nothing, which is great, because it enables us to pass on those savings to our supporters.
There are instances where being environmentally-conscious takes effort and expense, but this is an easy one to do, and it benefits everybody.
Right?
There’s one group of people for whom our approach doesn’t work. It’s the folks who insist that their unboxing experiences are amazing.
Opening a box that’s clearly been reused and/or filled with manufacturing scraps is a lacklustre experience, at best. I don’t deny this.
That said, I would much rather spend all of our efforts ensuring that our supporters have the best experience when they’re using our designs. To me, it’s okay that the short-lived unboxing experience is laughable, so long as the design works extremely well over its entire life.
Perhaps I’ll change my mind later down the line, but for now, I’m quite happy to keep putting all our energy into producing high quality kits, even if it means a less-than-glamorous unboxing.