These are our brand new envelopes for sending out your subscriptions, featuring illustrations by our friends over at Alter (they won an ARIA for Cut Copy’s album artwork last year and are generally pretty awesome.)
To be honest, these envelopes aren’t exactly “new” but in the two-months-of-non-stop-frantic-ness that we call Christmas, we didn’t get a chance to blog about them sooner.
We’ve been thinking long and hard about the envelopes that we use to send out our online orders (in fact, we posted about this problem almost a year ago today) and we weighed up dozens of different options for this new iteration: PVC bags, stiff cardboard, Fedex style pounches, bubble wrap envelopes and all sundry of combinations of the above.
It was important to strike a fine balance between protecting the magazine (keeping it from getting both bent and wet), shielding it from the eyes of the potentially thieving public (this happens more than you’d think!), looking good and being environmentally responsible.
Our old waterproofing solution of wrapping magazines in sealable plastic pouches worked in the very early days our business when we were sending out just a trickle of magazines, but when you’re posting out tens of thousands of mags each year the environmental consequences of all that land fill became stunningly apparent. Biodegradable organic plastic substitutes are still way too expensive for prime-time, so we went with a lightly waxed card that we’ve subjected to a number of in-house ‘soak’ tests.
And we reckon it came up pretty well!
That said, mag nation envelope v2.0. is only the second stage of what will undoubtedly be a long evolution and right now it’s far from perfect: the seal doesn’t always stick as well as it should, the printer completely forgot to put in an opening tab (d’oh!) and some customers in the rainier parts of far-North Queensland have requested extra waterproofing.
But it’s definitely a good start.
We’re committed to improving and iterating this as we go—heck, Netflix changed their envelope more than ten times in their first five years.
Got any ideas about how we might improve these? We’d love to hear your thoughts.