Bottles are one of the trickiest things to post. Glass is rigid, heavy for its size and has a narrow neck and a base that take the knocks in a courier network. Most breakages come down to the same two things: the bottle moving around inside the box, or the bottle touching the box wall or another bottle. Good packaging solves both by holding the bottle still and keeping it away from hard surfaces.
Here is a practical way to choose between sleeves, air packaging and boxes, whether you sell wine, spirits, craft beer, oils or sauces.
Start with the bottle, not the box
Before you look at any packaging, measure your bottle: height, and the diameter at its widest point. Every protection option below has a size range, and a bottle outside that range is the quickest way to end up with a loose fit.
Remember that our products are made to a manufacturer tolerance of 10-20mm either way, so leave a little room in your thinking rather than aiming for a millimetre-perfect fit. Where sizing is critical, order a sample first (more on that below).
Option 1: Corrugated bottle sleeves
A corrugated sleeve is a sheet of 600gsm brown cardboard that wraps around the bottle and moulds to it. Our corrugated bottle sleeves suit bottles, jars and similar items from 65mm to 100mm in diameter, up to 300mm tall without a fold. They are recyclable and light, so they add very little to your postage weight.
They work well as a snug first layer inside a postal box, especially for a single bottle that fits the diameter range comfortably.
Option 2: Flexi-Hex sleeves for varied bottle shapes
Flexi-Hex sleeves are a honeycomb-style paper wrap that stretches from 20mm up to 250mm in width, so one product can wrap a slim bottle or a wider one. That flexibility is handy if you sell several bottle sizes and want to keep your stock list short.
This is also one of the printed bottle products in our range. Our printed Flexi-Hex sleeves and wine bottle boxes carry your artwork in pre-defined print areas, and supplier branding or barcodes may appear on parts of the stock.
Option 3: Inflatable air packaging
Air packaging is made up of independent air columns that inflate around the bottle. If one column loses air, the others still cushion it. Our inflatable air packaging comes in single, double and triple bottle versions, and the single bottle version has an inflated internal size of approximately 310x80x80mm, designed for wine, spirits, whisky, gin and similar bottles.
You inflate it with a hand pump (we stock both manual and USB digital versions). One caution from the product details: if you use an air compressor, avoid over-inflating, because that can compromise the internal columns. It is also not a printed product, so it is a protection layer that sits inside your branded outer box.
Option 4: Shredded paper as a support layer
Void fill such as ZigZag shredded paper is useful for filling gaps and giving an unboxing feel, but on its own it will not hold a heavy glass bottle rigidly in place. Think of it as a supporting layer around a sleeve or air packaging, not a replacement for one.
Choosing the outer box
The outer box does the structural work, so it should fit the protected bottle without leaving big gaps. Our pinch top bottle boxes are corrugated E-flute board with an internal size of 120x120x395mm, and the wider printed bottle boxes and packs collection covers single-bottle formats, wooden bottle boxes and more.
Branding it honestly
We print full-colour digital artwork onto pre-manufactured stock, in pre-defined print areas only. That means your logo sits in a set area on the box rather than wrapping across every panel. There is also no white ink, so any white in your artwork shows as the colour of the material, which on brown kraft is brown. We also cannot guarantee exact Pantone matches, and we suggest avoiding large areas of solid block colour.
The upside is a fast turnaround and a simple rule for good results: a clean logo and a little text in the print area on a kraft box looks confident, and it never gets in the way of the protection doing its job.
Test before you ship a full batch
Whatever you choose, test it. Order a sample, pack a real bottle (or a filled one of the same size) exactly as a customer would receive it, and check that it does not rattle when shaken. Then drop-test a packed bottle from waist height onto a hard floor before you trust it with real orders. If it survives, you have a repeatable method you can write into your packing guide.
Our guide to ordering a packaging sample explains how to do this cheaply, and our frequently asked questions page covers proofing and our Total Satisfaction Guarantee, so you approve a printed sample before a full order is produced.
A simple packing checklist
- Measure bottle height and widest diameter first.
- Pick a sleeve or air packaging that matches that size range.
- Choose an outer box that fits the protected bottle without big gaps.
- Fill any remaining space so nothing can move.
- Shake-test, then drop-test a sample before you commit.
Get those five steps right and bottles stop being the product you dread posting.
