The history of the folding box

These days, it's hard to imagine a world without shipping boxes with bubble wrap for merchandise shipments and outer packaging. Even the post office keeps vast quantities of cardboard boxes and slip lid cardboard as shipping sleeves to keep everything running.

We may take the folding box for granted today, but at the end of the 19th century it was way ahead of its time. Its invention originally resulted from a production error and is credited to American inventor and entrepreneur Robert Gair.

In the beginning was the box: The forerunner of today's folding box as protective shipping packaging was the wooden crate until the 19th century. The material used was unplaned boards nailed together with metal pins to form packaging in various sizes. At that time, moving boxes or shipping bags were still unthinkable.

As a packaging material manufacturer and printing experts since 1961, we offer various printed labels, folding cartons and also unprinted custom boxes for shipping for online price calculation on our website.

From the beginning of the 19th century, lighter chipboard boxes came increasingly into use as transport packaging. They were the direct predecessors of the cardboard box as transport packaging. However, laboriously handmade boxes for consumption and everyday use had already existed since the 17th century.

Beginning in 1867, the Scottish immigrant Robert Gair produced paper bags for packaging purposes on specially developed machines in Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), a residential, industrial and commercial area in the New York borough of Brooklyn.

By the end of the American Civil War in 1865, paper had increasingly replaced the cotton or burlap packaging for foodstuffs, such as flour and sugar, that had been typical until then.

The scarce cotton was needed for uniforms and the cotton plantations in the southern states either suffered from a labor shortage or supplied (unofficially) to the enemy in the north.

Due to a mistake, a worker at his factory cut up 20,000 paper bags for packaging seeds in 1879. This loss inspired Robert Gair to think about a more effective, prefabricated paper container for packaging food and other goods.

In the same year, he developed a process for punching and creasing paper or cardboard in a single operation by machine and designed the first folding box pattern that could be produced by machine. Shortly afterwards, he patented a machine for producing folding cartons.

Folded cartons for transporting products already existed at that time, but they were cut and folded by women in laborious home work and were therefore very expensive.

With his inventions, Gair founded the folding carton industry and initiated a revolutionary development of the packaging industry with his life's work. These inventions were accompanied by other important patents: The American Albert Jones patented corrugated paper as a protective material in 1871. The origin of corrugated board was born.

Jones first used corrugated paper for packaging purposes, namely for wrapping and shipping bottles and glass vials. His inspiration for corrugated paper appears to have been textile ruffles, which were made using so-called pleating machines.

In the early days of custome-made cartons, the large cartons still had to be glued by hand. In 1879, machine cutting and punching was developed in the USA and the first industrial gluing machine was patented in 1895.

The need for suitable packaging materials for the newly emerging branded goods and "stores'' grew enormously at the turn of the century, the age of the industrial revolution. Robert Gair's folding boxes became an absolute hit.

He produced packaging for the Bloomingdales department store, for Colgate to package soaps, detergents, tooth powder and toothpaste, for Pond's beauty creams and some cigarette brands, among others. But his real breakthrough came in 1896 with the packaging of Nabisco`s popular "Uneeda Biscuits'' in folding cartons.

Robert Gair produced the first two million boxes for the National Biscuit Company, cereals followed. Consumer convenience packaging was born. Uneeda was one of the first mass-produced branded products not limited to one region.

National Biscuit Co. launched the first prepackaged biscuit with the slogan "Lest you forget, we say it yet, Uneeda Biscuit." ("Lest you forget, we say it yet, Uneeda Biscuit ''). This may have been the world's first multi-million dollar advertising campaign.

Interestingly, it is precisely the constant direct repetition of the brand name that is increasingly to be found in today's advertising world - typical example "Seitenbacher muesli".

From now on, the packaging of small quantities was no longer done in the "stores" out of large bags or containers, but already in the factory at the manufacturer.

However, it was not necessarily the size of the packaging or the speed with which it was packaged by machine that decisively promoted the triumph of folding cartons.

For the manufacturers, it was above all the possibility of printing advertising on all six sides of the folding carton! With advertising on the packages, ads in magazines, and promotion on large billboards, the manufacturers took control of the market, not the retailer.

Candy, cigarettes and crackers were now available at the POS not in unlabeled tins, but in printed folding cartons, attractive merchandise shelves and creative store displays.

Until the end of his life, Robert Gair not only perfected "his" folding boxes, but also dealt with the lithographic process of printing advertising. His inventions were adopted in England by E.S. & A. Robinson, a long-time business partner, and quickly spread beyond the British Empire, throughout the world.

Robert Gair died a rich man in 1927, and his inventions completely revolutionized the world of packaging, consumerism and advertising. With the shipping box made of solid board and with the invention of corrugated board, the history of shipping packaging was decisively shaped.

Their good material properties, their protection factor, the low dead weight and, last but not least, their versatility soon made folding cartons the No. 1 material for shipping - and they have remained so to this day.

Fascination folding boxes

Without exaggerating, it can be said that without industrially produced folding cartons, today's goods traffic, and thus our consumer society, would not exist at all.

Folding cartons are available on a massive scale. Folding cartons are simple, inexpensive packaging materials made of cardboard, corrugated cardboard or foil, which are sent to the respective packer folded up to save space and then erected manually or by machine and filled with a product. And folding cartons can be easily combined with other packaging materials.

There is nothing complicated about the principle of the "folding box"; what is spectacular, however, is the efficiency with which folding boxes, despite their simple structure, can fulfill several primary packaging functions at the same time.

From the point of view of product packaging, folding cartons are universal all-rounders: they protect the packaged goods, they can be stacked and transported easily, they can be labeled on all sides, and their surface is a perfect advertising medium.

It is precisely the combination of these properties that makes folding cartons so fascinating for professionals in the graphic arts and packaging industries.

"Well packaged is half sold": From the consumer's point of view, the contents of the folding carton and the external visual and haptic appearance form an inseparable unit.

It is not the goods that are the product, but the goods and the folding carton together that form a product unit. The packaging is the first thing that is perceived during purchase; it provides orientation in the range of goods and, along with other important factors, influences the purchase decision at the POS.

The choice of packaging material can also influence how consumers perceive a product. Folding cartons made from cardboard or corrugated board differ from packaging made from plastic, tinplate or aluminium in terms of material composition, protective properties and available disposal and recycling routes. Whether one packaging solution has environmental advantages over another depends on the specific packaging design, its intended use and the environmental aspects being compared.

Folding cartons can be made from different grades of cardboard containing primary fibres, recycled paper fibres or a combination of both. The exact fibre composition depends on the board grade used, and primary fibres may come from different sources of wood and pulp.

Last but not least, there is hardly any other print product that is subjected to such an elaborate finishing process as the folding carton. Product designers and media designers are constantly creating new shapes and motifs in order to optimize the emotional impact of folding box packaging on the purchasing decision.

Their task is also to combine emotion with factual information content. Every year, competitions such as the German Packaging Award or the ProCarton/ECMA Carton Award bear witness to the endless creativity and ingenuity of the packaging industry and leave print professionals amazed at what is possible.