How to Brief a Printer: The 10 Things Your Packaging Vendor Needs Before They Can Quote

1. What the Product Is, and Which Format

The single most common opening line in an enquiry is a request for a price on boxes. That cannot be answered. Within packaging alone, a two-piece rigid box with a lift-off lid, a magnetic-closure rigid box, a reverse tuck-end folding carton, a crash-lock base carton and a corrugated e-commerce mailer are entirely different products, made on different equipment, from different materials, with different minimums. The same is true across print: a saddle-stitched brochure and a perfect-bound catalogue share almost nothing in production terms. If you do not know the technical name for what you want, describe its behaviour — does it collapse flat, does it have a separate lid, does it need to survive a courier — and any competent printer will identify the format from that.

2. Dimensions, and Which Ones

For packaging, quote internal dimensions, in millimetres, in the order length by width by height. This matters more than it sounds. Board has thickness, and on a rigid box that thickness is significant, so an external measurement leaves the printer guessing at the usable internal space and your product may not fit the box you approved. If the packaging is for a specific product, the most reliable brief is the product's own dimensions plus a note on how snug the fit should be and whether an insert is needed. For flat print, give the finished trim size and say whether that is folded or flat — an A4 brochure that folds to A5 needs both numbers to be unambiguous.

• Packaging: internal dimensions in millimetres, length x width x height.
• State whether an insert, divider or tray is required inside.
• Flat print: finished trim size, and both flat and folded dimensions if it folds.
• Multi-page work: page count including cover, and whether it is a multiple of four.

3. Quantity, and More Than One of Them

Quantity is the variable with the largest influence on unit economics, and a single-quantity brief hides the information you most need. Setup costs — plates, dies, make-ready — are largely fixed regardless of run length, so they spread across the run and the unit rate falls as volume rises. But it does not fall smoothly. It steps, at the points where the job moves to a different press, a different sheet layout or a different process entirely. Asking for three tiers reveals where those steps are, and it is common to discover that a modest increase in quantity crosses a step and lowers the unit rate more than the extra volume costs. Say honestly whether the quantity is firm or exploratory, and whether repeat runs are expected, because a printer will approach tooling differently if a die will be reused.

4. Substrate, or a Sample You Like

Material can be specified two ways and both are legitimate. If you know the stock, name it: grade, weight in GSM, coated or uncoated, and any texture. If you do not, send a physical sample of something whose feel you want to match. A sample communicates weight, surface, stiffness and finish simultaneously, and it removes the ambiguity in phrases like premium or thick, which mean different things to different people. Photographs are much weaker than samples here, because the properties that matter most are tactile. If the packaging has a functional requirement — it must survive a courier network, it must hold a certain weight, it must not scuff in transit — state that instead of guessing at a material, and let the printer specify against the requirement.

5. Finishing, Stated Explicitly

Finishing has a substantial effect on both cost and schedule, and it is the element most often left out of an initial brief and then added after a quote is issued, which invalidates the quote. Say what you want: lamination type across the whole surface, and any contrast effects such as spot UV, foil stamping, embossing or debossing. If you are unsure, say which elements you want to stand out and let the printer propose the mechanism. Be aware that each effect is a separate production pass, so finishing decisions are also schedule decisions.

6. Artwork: What State Is It Actually In?

There are three honest answers and the brief should contain one of them. Print-ready means the file is in the correct colour mode, at the right resolution, with bleed, with fonts outlined or supplied, laid out to a dieline. Needs adaptation means a design exists but was built for a different format, or for screen, and requires reworking. Does not exist means design is part of the job. Each of these is a normal situation and none of them is a problem — but they carry different timelines and different scopes, and a brief that claims print-ready artwork which then arrives as a screen-resolution image in RGB will cost time that nobody planned for. Design and artwork adaptation are handled in-house at RoboSouls, so it is genuinely fine to say the artwork is not ready. It is not fine to discover it late.

7. Does a Dieline Exist?

For any packaging that is die-cut — cartons, mailers, rigid box wraps, presentation folders with pockets — the dieline is the flat template that defines every cut, crease and glue tab. If a previous vendor produced one and you own it, supply it, because reusing an existing die saves both tooling and time. If you do not have one, say so and it will be created as part of the job; custom dieline creation is done in-house here. What causes trouble is neither of those, it is a design laid out to a dieline that nobody can locate, where artwork exists but the template it was built against is missing. Establish early which of the three situations you are in.

8. Packing, Delivery and Destination

How the finished goods need to arrive is part of the specification, not an afterthought. State the delivery location or locations, whether the consignment splits across sites, and how it should be packed — bulk cartons, counted sub-packs, individually poly-wrapped, palletised. Retail-bound goods often need specific carton counts and labelling. If the goods will be stored before use, say so, because rigid boxes shipped assembled take considerably more space than flat-packed cartons and that changes what warehousing is needed. Delivery is pan India, but the pattern of delivery still affects the quote.

9. The Deadline, and What It Is Tied To

A deadline stated without context invites a printer either to over-promise or to quote a premium against a date that was never firm. Saying that materials are needed for a specific event on a specific date lets the schedule be worked backwards honestly, including approval time, which is the step most often forgotten. Production at RoboSouls runs to a 72 hour turnaround, and where something needs to move faster than that it is assessed case by case rather than promised in advance. What matters most is that the date includes your own approval cycle: a schedule that assumes same-day sign-off from a committee that meets weekly is not a schedule.

10. Who Approves, and How Many Rounds

The approval process belongs in the brief because it consumes calendar time and shapes the proofing requirement. Name who signs off, whether a physical proof is required or a digital one will do, and how many review rounds to expect. A physical proof is the only reliable way to check colour, finish and construction together, and it adds days that need to sit in the schedule rather than come out of production. Where several stakeholders are involved, consolidating feedback into one round rather than several sequential ones is the single largest time saving available in most projects.

11. A Brief You Can Copy

Everything above condenses into a short block of text. A brief in this shape can be priced accurately by any printer, and — more usefully — produces quotes from different vendors that are actually comparable to each other, because they are all answering the same question.