Packaging Editing and Proofreading Services

The pack passed the drop test. It was dropped from a metre onto a flat steel plate, on its base, in a laboratory at twenty degrees, six times. Then it went through a parcel network where it was thrown onto a corner, stacked under four hundred kilos for eleven hours in a hot trailer, and vibrated at forty miles an hour on a pallet with a gap under one edge. The test was real. It was a test of something else.

We edit what packaging designers and converters produce — packaging specifications and their test basis, transit and distribution test protocols and reports, artwork and text approval documentation, pack performance and compatibility documentation, secondary and tertiary packaging specifications, palletisation and load stability documentation, labelling and marking requirements, sustainability and recyclability claims and their basis, cost and material specification documents, and customer-facing guidance on handling and storage. Our editors work on the specification and what it was tested against.

The packaging specification and its transit test basis is where packaging either survives the real distribution route or passes a laboratory, and its failure is a test protocol chosen for convenience. We work through these so the specification states the distribution route the pack is designed for, with the number of handlings, the modes, the stacking height and the climate, since a pack designed for palletised full loads and used for single-parcel despatch is a different product; so the test protocol is named with the specific schedule and severity level used, because these standards contain many options and citing the standard alone tells nobody which was applied; so the drop orientations are listed including the corners and edges rather than only the base and faces, given that real damage arrives on corners; so the compression test states the duration, the temperature and the humidity, as board loses a large fraction of its strength in a humid trailer and a short test at ambient conditions overstates performance considerably; so the pack is tested with the actual product or a validated dummy of the same mass distribution; so any pack that passed at a lower severity than the route requires is identified with the residual risk stated; and so the specification says what the pack is not designed for. Specifications written this way predict what will arrive at the customer.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including specifications, test data and customer information. We are editors rather than packaging technologists, and we offer no view on pack design, test protocols or performance. What we can do is make the specification say what it was actually tested for.