Healthcare Lab Worker Bemoans an Over-Packaged Shipment

The rough-and-tumble ecommerce supply chain can be brutal. Broken packages often mean unusable products. That creates a negative user experience and generates unnecessary waste.

Protective packaging becomes even more important when the product itself is more important — like life-saving pharmaceuticals or laboratory test samples. In this environment of COVID-19, we’re seeing more of these types of shipments as both ecommerce and healthcare activities have intensified.

But we almost never hear people rave when products arrive safely intact. A search on Twitter for #PackagingSuccess brings up just a handful of posts, with the most recent one from 2018. :(

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course. UK lab employee Holly Tipper complained on Twitter earlier this year about over-packaging for a shipment of a 2-milliliter tube of Proteinase K, a fungus-derived recombinant, deeming it a #PackagingFail and #BadPackaging.

In a great example of a productive social media exchange, the manufacturer, Qiagen, says it is working on improving the packaging. And, behold! Marketing savvy packaging supplier Quickbox offers its help.

Perhaps this will ultimately turn into a #PackagingSuccess!