Remember the feeling of opening a present on Christmas day?

The excitement, the anticipation, that tingling feeling. The same feeling has become a part of our everyday life over the past 5 years. The so-called unboxing experience has gone from being a seasonal pleasure to something that is now expected by customers at every single time they buy something. Unboxing has become a powerful marketing tool as it is the main physical touchpoint an online brand has with its customer and the first impression a consumer has with the product. This trend has been fuelled by early innovators in the packaging space, like Apple. The company’s packaging designers spent long months precisely designing the first iPhone’s box to have the perfect drag and friction at opening, creating an enticing pause before you unveil the product. Custom packaging, however, has been only available for large companies. High minimum volume orders, finding the supplier with the right type of packaging and a competitive price, long lead and delivery times, and design expertise have been all barriers for smaller businesses.

Packaging suppliers are losing out on D2C

Yet, smaller, direct-to-consumer (D2C) e-commerce companies have been having a growth spurt in recent years, as global supply chains, outsourced fulfillment services, and easy-to-use social media marketing tools now enable anyone to start an online business that stands a chance against large companies.

Standing a chance or building a successful business, however, are two different things. E-commerce giants have years of experience, well-established brands, huge marketing budgets, and a vast product range. Although shopper interest is undoubtedly increasing in D2C, these specialised shops need to use all tools at their disposal to build a loyal, recurring customer base. Amongst many things, they need to make sure their brand tells a story, that they get influencers excited, and that they provide a personalised shopping experience. Custom packaging could help with all of these if smaller brands had easy access to it.

Suppliers on the other hand are not operating at max capacity, and they would be more than happy to get in on the international D2C boom. Without digital design and ordering processes, however, they cannot serve SMBs profitably. The majority of these suppliers are offline and consequently, they are struggling to market and sell their products across borders. Meet Packhelp — a tech-enabled marketplace that makes such demand and supply meet that was unknown to each other until not so long ago

Packhelp is the digital bridge between D2C SMBs and suppliers. The managed marketplace empowers smaller businesses to access custom-branded, high-quality packages in small quantities and at competitive prices. At the same time, Packhelp also opens up a new profitable segment for packaging suppliers. The Polish team has literally hacked European packaging supply chains. Packhelp connected offline local factories into one digital system and arranged logistics around this system in a way that the company’s customers can enjoy a broad range of packaging products and economies of scale that was previously only available for the largest players. In addition to this, Packhelp’s online editor brings modern customer experience to one of the most undigitized industries. It looks simple on the surface, yet, under the hood, the Packhelp platform consists of a family of applications powering thousands of automated quotes and transactions each month across Europe.

Packhelp is also helping customers with their sustainability challenges. E-commerce brands are facing increasing pressure to decrease their environmental impact as customers want to buy from companies who are doing their best to save our planet. The company has a wide range of innovative sustainable packaging options which is continuously growing.

Investing in Packhelp

Packhelp has been on a steady, steep growth curve since its foundation. Today, the company is present in 30 countries and serves 5000+ customers, who love the brand. Although 90%+ of the operations are in Poland, 60%+ of revenues are coming from DACH, UK, and France, which translates into a real cross-continental “arbitrage”. The company became Europe’s leading custom packaging marketplace and built significant entry barriers thanks to its technology which embodies the team’s deep packaging and supply chain expertise. This is all great! What really made us excited, however, was the moment when we started thinking about macro trends which could fuel the company’s growth in the next 5–10 years. We couldn’t believe how long the buzzword list became: e-commerce growth acceleration, direct-to-consumer boom, micro-brand revolution, unboxing videos, pressure to personalise all customer touchpoints, sustainability pressures, and the list could go on for a while. Packhelp is providing the underlying infrastructure for all of these trends by digitalising a close to $1 trillion global packaging industry that is rapidly growing. And since the packaging industry is not the sexiest — or at least it hasn’t been until now — there is very little competition with similar asset-light business models.

SIX Co-founders

Packhelp has six (!) co-founders, which can sound a bit odd at first, but that feeling goes away quite quickly as one starts talking to the team members. It didn’t matter whether we talked to Wojtek, Maciej Z., Patryk, Maciej W., Konrad or Arkadiusz, we came away from each conversation with the same strong positive feeling. Each founder had such strong domain expertise, vision, drive, intelligence, and they’ve already achieved so much together, that we quickly became certain we found a unique group of individuals. Furthermore, the way these individuals’ diverse skillset complements each other in such a large setup is something that we’ve never seen before.

We are honoured to be part of Packhelp’s €40 million Series B fundraise and super happy to co-invest with InfraVia Growth and FJ Labs, as well as previous investors SpeedInvest, PROfounders, Market One, Inovo, and White Star. The funding will enable the company to further grow its operations across Europe and UK, empower brands to use more environmentally friendly packaging materials, and enter the enterprise segment.