How to choose the right packaging material for gifts

[Liz Seyi]

Whether you are operating an online store and offer your customers the opportunity to have a gift sent directly to the recipient, or you are an individual considering the best way to send a gift yourself to an important someone, it isn’t just Christmas when you might need to carefully consider the optimal choice of packaging material for a gift.
So, what are some of the factors that you will have to think about when deciding on which packaging material to use for gifts?

What should the packaging material look like?

This might seem an odd subject for us to touch upon first when it comes to packaging material for a gift. After all, who really cares what it looks like, if it packages and protects the gift nicely for the recipient’s benefit?

But as we will address elsewhere in this article, a lot of potential packaging materials for a gift can do a very good job of protecting a given item from damage. So, once that factor is dealt with, the aesthetics might still be a high priority for you.

Our own shredded craft paper for gifts here at Shredded-Paper.co.uk, for instance, can be purchased in any of a broad range of colour mixes, and in both straight cut and zig-zag forms. This could enable you to easily coordinate the appearance of your chosen packaging material with the specific special occasion for which the gift might have been purchased, such as Christmas or Valentine’s Day.

Which packaging material would be best at protecting the given item?

This, of course, is generally seen as the most important question for those selecting a packaging material for any kind of item – never mind just gifts. Spending money on a given material on the basis of it looking good is unlikely to be considered a wise course of action by the recipient if the gift arrives at its destination having sustained avoidable damage.

And it’s certainly true that different types of packaging material can be great for different types of gift. Bubble wrap, for example, is a very versatile form of protective packaging material, but it’s recommended that you don’t use it on its own for the packaging of especially fragile goods.
Tissue paper, meanwhile, can be great for shielding more delicate items from scuffing or other damage; it might be easily crushed, however, by larger and heavier pieces. That’s one more reason why you might instead consider our own shredded kraft paper for gifts, which is tougher than most of the other shredded tissue paper options out there, while still looking cool and rustic.

Which packaging material would be the friendliest to the environment?

We’ve come a long way since the days when the sustainability of a given packaging material would have been seen as only the concern of committed ‘eco warriors’. We are in an age in which businesses and consumers alike are much more ecologically aware – and if you are a business, you may also be eager to use environmentally friendly materials as a means of communicating your brand values in this regard.

Bubble wrap is certainly one material that has given rise to concerns about the environmental impact surrounding its use. By contrast, paper – given that it is made from plant materials – is biodegradable, and therefore has a reputation as being much gentler on the planet.

How does our own shredded paper rate in this sense? Well, as we have previously written about, shredded paper in general hasn’t always had the best reputation for eco-friendliness. But it is also important to separate the facts from the myths about the various shredded paper options out there; we are very proud, for instance, to offer reusable, recyclable and biodegradable options in our store.

While the above aren’t the only questions you might ask yourself when deciding between the possibilities for gift packaging material, they provide a good starting point for narrowing down your options.

Naturally, we’re loud and proud about our own popular shredded craft paper for gifts – so why not browse our store today to see the complete range of shredded papers we presently have available?