I Missed My Calling As A Packaging Designer

There are certain tasks that I undertake here that have absolutely no financial benefit - tasks that I do just out of sheer pleasure (or obsessiveness.) Labeling my egg cartons is definitely one of them. My mom rolls her eyes at these types of tasks. She also did when meticulously labeled the goat milk soap complete with weight, and candles with proper warnings. What can I say? My dad’s motto is there’s no doing like overdoing, mine is “presentation is everything.” I have spent countless hours designing and re-designing labels for all sorts of things. You can put the most mundane object in beautiful packaging, and give it completely different feel. Same thing if you cook a delicious dinner and you serve it on paper plates and plastic cups versus your grandmothers fine China. It changes the whole experience.

Packaging is very important to me. When you do farm things on this small scale, there are never extra funds for things like fancy packaging - you have to go the simple route. This is unacceptable to me, so I do the fancy myself. 

For me to prep cut and apply labels to 24 egg cartons takes about two hours. $16 worth of cartons, 20 pieces of fancy paper ($3) a full $3 bottle of Elmers rubber cement. The cost including my time is around $2.91 per carton. Will I get a return on that investment? We will never really know, I guess - but I feel darn good when I hand people a product from our ranch that is great quality and looks gorgeous.