Apothecary, by design.
Glass body, metal lid, printed label, wide mouth. Every packaging decision and why we made it.
Open a Sunnbalm tin and the first thing you notice is the weight of the lid. It's metal. It threads onto the body with a quarter-turn. The body is glass — clear, with a peach-toned printed label, no plastic shrink-wrap, no inner foil seal that you have to fight off with a fingernail.
We chose every element of the packaging deliberately, and most of those choices made the product slightly more expensive than it would have been with the industry-default plastic-jar-and-shrink-band. Here's the thinking on each.
Glass body. Glass is heavier, more breakable, and more expensive to ship than plastic. It's also chemically inert. Tallow and beeswax don't leach plasticisers from glass the way they can from soft plastics over time. Glass also looks better, signals quality, and is recyclable in most municipal programs. The break risk is mitigated by jar size (120 ml is still small enough to pack safely) and packaging (each jar ships in a corrugated sleeve).
Metal lid. Plastic lids strip threads over time, especially when the product is screwed and unscrewed daily. Metal lids don't. They're also recyclable in nearly all municipal metal programs. The closure feels different — a satisfying weight when you twist the lid back on, a metallic click when it seats. That feeling is part of the product.
Wide-mouth opening. Most balm jars have a narrow opening (smaller than the body diameter) to discourage product loss. We went the opposite direction — a wide opening, almost the full diameter of the jar, so you can scoop with a finger easily and see exactly how much product is left. The trade-off is slightly faster oxidation of the surface layer, which is why we limit shelf life to twelve months after opening. We chose the open access.
Printed label, not adhesive sticker. Stickers peel, yellow, get oily, and look bad after three months in a steamy bathroom. We print directly onto the glass with a ceramic ink that's fired on. It costs more per unit. It looks the same after a year that it did on day one.
No outer carton. Most cosmetics ship in a paper carton wrapping the jar, then in a shipping box. The carton is for retail display, mostly. We don't sell in retail yet, so the carton has no purpose — it would be packaging waste for the sake of perceived value. We ship the jar directly in a corrugated sleeve with a small information card. Less waste, lower shipping weight, same arrival quality.
Information card, not insert booklet. A single half-letter card with usage notes, ingredient list, batch code, and a hand-written customer thank-you. Easier to read than a folded multi-panel insert.
The peach label. This was the hardest design decision. We tested seven label colours — cream, sage, terracotta, charcoal, white, kraft, peach. Peach won because it suggests warmth without being feminine-coded, suggests outdoor without being beach-coded, and reads well on glass. The 'sunnbalm' wordmark in the marker-style script is hand-drawn from a Knewave base with a custom kerning pass.
We are not a packaging-obsessed brand. We make a balm and we ship it in a container that respects the product. That's the brief.