You never think about how utterly floppy a bag is until you try to wrestle it into an agreeable shaped using only paper.
During my tenure at BAGGU, my team was responsible for packaging our entire product line with that exact constraint. Eliminating plastic waste was central to our mission — therefore paper, fabric and glue were the only acceptable materials.
Most of this work was done in close collaboration with Jessy Agle.
Left: When I arrived at BAGGU, our products were minimally packaged — most sold with just a hangtag connected by a plastic tach-it. The material use was economical, but that was pretty much the only advantage.
Hangtags were particularly terrible for merchandising reusable nylon bags — our bestselling line of products — which we sold folded into compact square pouches. With no way to hang them, retailers would instead cram them into containers or bowls where they easily became a miserable, tangled mess.
Even worse, the hangtags were tiny and provided little information. Customers struggled to understand what the bags would look like unfolded — which encouraged them to pull bags out of their pouches.
Right: To remedy this, we developed sleeves that would hug the pouched bags and allow them to hang. No more micro-plastics, no more ways to get tangled together.
Better yet, the sleeves provided additional space for larger images and additional copy. On-model photography helped to communicate the look and scale of the bags. We even printed instructions for how to refold your bag into its pouch on the inner side of the sleeve.
Left: The sleeves took some solving, of course. The depth and size needed to be carefully tailored to the bag, so as to minimize crushing and crinkling. Early samples were glued, but when this proved unreliable we switched to a tongue-lock closure.
The biggest challenge was the integral hang-tabs — they had a tendency to rip when customers pulled at them. Thankfully, our product design team agreed to add fabric hanging loops to the pouches, which is how they are sold now.
Above: Sleeves also provided an excellent canvas for collaboration-specific packaging, like these from a collaboration with The Met.
It was a seemingly elegant solution… but its record in the field was mixed. There is an inherent material mismatch between paper and fabric — one is weak and rigid, the other tough and malleable. As a result, the boxes had a tendency to crush because their contents easily compressed under pressure. Afterwards the bags sprang right back into shape… but the boxes never quite regained their luster.
Right: After some experimentation, we abandoned the boxes in favor of a fabric pouch with an oversized hang tag. We were initially a bit disappointed, but wholesale partners were thoroughly pleased — the pouches merchandise easily, and are much more durable.
Below: We applied this same approach to countless other products across our line. Sets of pouches were always the most challenging, often requiring complex, novel dielines.
