Switching corrugated supplier without disrupting supply
Why resellers stay with a supplier they are unhappy with, where switches actually go wrong, and a plan that moves a range across without a customer noticing.
By Tradepack ·
Most packaging resellers have at least one supplier they would leave if leaving were simple. The price has crept, the lead times have slipped, or the colour on the last delivery was not the colour on the one before. And yet the business stays where it is.
It is rarely inertia. It is risk. A reseller’s reputation sits on every delivery, and a single bad one in front of a good customer can cost more than a year of the savings that prompted the switch. So the question is not whether a new supplier is better on paper. It is whether the move can be made without anybody downstream noticing.
It can. Switches go wrong in predictable places, and every one of them can be dealt with before the first order.
Where switches go wrong
The specification was never written down. It lives in the old supplier’s system and in somebody’s memory. The new supplier quotes from the dimensions and the board description, and the box that arrives is right by the drawing and wrong by the customer.
The tooling belongs to someone else. The cutting forme and printing plates sit at the old manufacturer. Nobody checked who owns them until the new supplier asked for them.
The colour moves. The brand colour was matched years ago to a drawdown nobody kept. The new run is matched to the Pantone chip instead, and it is visibly different.
The pallet changes. Different cases per layer, a different height, a different wrap. The customer’s warehouse notices before anyone else does.
The cut-over is a single date. Old stock runs out on Monday, new stock is due on Tuesday, and Tuesday’s delivery is late.
A switch plan that works
1. Write the specification down first. Style, internal dimensions, board grade with paper weights, crease positions, closure, print and pallet configuration. Our guide to briefing a manufacturer lists what to capture. If you only do one thing, do this: a written specification is what makes the box transferable at all.
2. Settle tooling before you move. Find out where the cutting forme and the printing plates are held and whether they can be released. Either answer is fine; not knowing is the problem, because it decides whether the first run carries a tooling cost.
3. Sample against the current box. Not against the drawing. Put a sample from the new supplier next to the box the customer is using today, load both with real product, and pack them on a real bench. Differences that matter show up in ten minutes.
4. Match colour to the box, not the chip. Pull a drawdown on the actual board and compare it to the current printed box under daylight. The Pantone on kraft piece explains why the chip is the wrong reference on brown liner.
5. Run in parallel. Keep enough of the old stock to cover the overlap and bring the first new delivery in while it is still there. If anything about the first run is wrong, the customer never sees it.
6. Move one line first. A high-volume line with a straightforward specification makes the best test. Run it for a cycle, then move the rest of the range with the specification process already proven.
7. Avoid peak. Switch in a quiet period, never in the run-up to the busiest weeks of your customers’ year.
What to ask the new supplier
Before any of that, a short set of questions separates suppliers who will make the switch easy from those who will make it your problem:
- Will you work from my written specification and confirm it back in writing?
- Will you cut a sample and let us load it with real product before tooling is ordered?
- How do you control colour from one run to the next?
- What lead time will you commit to for scheduled call-offs, and what happens when you miss it?
- Will you deliver to my customer’s site in my name, and never contact my customer directly?
That last one matters more than it looks.
Why the last question matters
A reseller’s customer relationship is the business. A manufacturer that also sells to end users has every reason, sooner or later, to want that relationship for itself.
We are trade only. We manufacture behind distributors’ and resellers’ own ranges, deliver to their warehouse or drop-ship to their customer in their name, and do not sell to end users. That is a commercial position rather than a promise, and it is the reason a switch to us does not put your customer list at risk.
Send us the specification for one line and we will sample it against the box you are using now.
