While the primary packaging of food and beverage products looks fantastic, once these packages enter a cardboard shipping container, they seem to lose their identity, their pizzazz—all the effort that went into the package and label design is lost in the plain old shipping carton. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Sutherland Packaging, a supplier of corrugated point-of-purchase (POP) displays and packaging for retail locations and club stores, has begun a program to make e-commerce shipping cartons more vibrant and brand-worthy while holding costs down. The company’s new E-COMplete e-commerce printing program allows customers to create cost-effective corrugated shippers that are direct extensions of their brands. No more bland containers, just cartons that are effective customer engagement tools.

Today, when a customer receives a carton from Amazon, there’s no doubt where it originated. Once, Amazon shipped in plain old boxes, but now there’s name recognition; the carton also serves as a reminder of Amazon products and services. Many other online retailers are now realizing that the shipping container is the final statement of their brands, and the carton’s graphic design should make a positive, proud brand statement.

Sutherland’s Packaging E-COMplete originated from a combination of the company’s longstanding versatility and recently incorporated technology. In addition to precision, high-speed lithographic printing, the company has also perfected an innovative direct printing technique, which gets around the traditional practice of mounting a lithographic label over corrugated surfaces.

Well suited for the retail consumer products sector and club displays, this maximal impact, cost-effective full-color technology enables customers to save on both material expenditures and shipping times. Sutherland also features high-speed digital production with color matching capabilities.

Sutherland’s ability to provide ultra-customized solutions—for example combining direct-to-corrugated with litho or conventional printing methods with digital technology—opens new possibilities for shippers. Sutherland’s new large-format, double-sided printer allows single-pass capabilities for corrugated packaging.

“By cost-effectively beautifying previously plain boxes, Sutherland Packaging’s E-COMplete is an effective customer retention tool in the fast-growing online retail sector,” says Tom Sutherland, president of Sutherland Packaging. “For too long, e-commerce shippers have been overlooked as the valuable branding tools and customer touchpoints they offer retailers. Our new program provides sorely-needed improvements to corrugated shippers.”