How Custom Packaging Increases Sales

Posted on by Kaylyn Perry

This is a guest post by Arka

Custom packaging is a fantastic marketing tool that brands often overlook. In this crowded marketplace, as brands scream for attention, custom packaging can be an effective marketing tool that can help you cut through the noise and stand apart from your competition. Although your customers witness your packaging for only a few minutes, you can create a positive buying experience in just those few moments. In fact, custom packaging can make or break your brand. But, if done right, it can help increase your sales! Let’s dig deep to understand.

Get noticed with ‘out-of-the-box’ design

A custom-designed package helps your product get noticed. When you’re in the department store and confused between two brands, packaging can influence you to make a purchase decision. Packages that are attractive, stand out, and not just plain ‘vanilla’, tend to grab your attention and influence your purchase decision. While the quality of a product does matter, the packaging is the first point of contact between you and the customers. It is important to pay attention to your packaging as much as you do to your product. Your product package is a blank canvas where you can play around your brand story to create a purchase preference for your customers.

Custom packaging for brand recall

Remember that arrow and a smile on the custom shipping box waiting at your doorway from Amazon? Every time you see a custom shipping box with that smile arrow logo, you immediately know that it is from a particular brand – Amazon. Custom packaging helps with easy brand recognition; custom packaging creates a positive impact and boosts excitement in customers when done strategically. In short, custom packaging increases your sales when done consistently.

Educate your customers through custom packaging

Custom packaging is not just meant to attract customers by its look and feel, but it can be also used smartly to educate and connect with your customers. Packaging can talk about the product, your brand’s philosophy, how you care and impact the environment around you, and a much more! Your packaging can give customers a way to connect with your brand in a way that a product alone often cannot. This helps keep your brand in the top of consumers’ minds as they make a purchasing decision. Custom packaging can smartly connect you with customers, which can affect your bottom line in the long run.

Emotional selling through custom packaging

A psychology and marketing study established that impulsive buying has a lot to do with the attractiveness of the packaging, even when the buyer might not have initially had an intention to buy! During the study, functional magnetic resonance imaging (an MRI) was conducted to measure the neural response (activity in the brain) against the perception of product packages and impulsive buying tendencies. The study found that attractive and custom packaging produced a more intense impulse, establishing the fact that there is indeed a relationship between impulsive buying and custom packaging. Other brands use this idea to increase their sales and so can you!

Create an unmatched ‘unboxing’ experience

With tons of unboxing videos already posted to social media, it is no-brainer that many shoppers are glued to the unboxing experience in addition to just the product. When a brand creates a positive unboxing experience, it encourages the customer to share their experience on social media (read: free marketing for your brand!), plus you can convert a one-time customer into a loyal returning customer. Unboxing experiences complement a brand’s traditional marketing efforts and you shouldn’t miss this opportunity to stand out.

Customization is the key

We love customization — it shows thoughtfulness of person or party giving it to us. With customized packaging, you can add a personalized note, timely holiday greetings, and promotional offers that can be shared with customers’ friends and family — every bit of customization counts toward creating a joyful experience for customers!

7 Ways to Leverage Passive Income to Change Your Life Forever

Posted on by Kaylyn Perry

This is a guest post by Money Crashers

Passive income has a bad rap because too many people charge money for courses promising millions in profit every year.  The term leaves the same taste in your mouth as “get rich quick” and “multi-level marketing.”

You’re right to be skeptical, but real passive income opportunities happen daily. These aren’t instant and false millionaire promises. They’re ways to work a little harder now to make just enough money to change the financial course of your life.

It starts with a trickle, which you can turn into a stream. And with work and smart decisions, you can leverage that stream into the life you’ve always wanted.

Two Preliminary Truths

Before we get to the seven techniques to leverage passive income, you need to understand two basic facts:

Truth #1: These Techniques Work for Any Form of Passive Income

Passive income is earnings created from a type of entity in which you’re not actively involved. Possible options are Amazon small businesses, rental properties, investments, and drop-shipping. No matter what kind of passive income you choose to explore, the ideas below will help you craft ways to harness the income you generate.

Truth #2: Passive Income Doesn’t Start Passive

No one is saying this will be easy. You will invest time in research, setup, marketing, and management in the first months and even years of your passive income empire. Once you get things rolling, though, it will snowball and leave you with ample free time while the money takes care of itself.

With those truths in mind, let’s get to the techniques.

7 Ways to Leverage Passive Income and Change Your Life Forever

1. The Debt Snowball

If you have credit card debt, use your passive income to cut yourself free from it. Apply all of your extra income from your side projects to killing your lowest-balance loan. Once it’s dead, apply all of that plus the minimum payment for that loan to the next-lowest balance. Over time, you’ll be debt-free except for your mortgage – and even that will look like something you can manage in a matter of years.

The less debt you have, the farther your existing income can take you. This fundamental change to your personal balance sheet will change your life.

2. Going Halfsies

Many believe extra money is for luxuries and enjoyment. But that’s why so many people have good short-term finances but a poor long-term prospectus. The smart financial move is to put any extra money you make into investment accounts or use it to pay off loans.

The good news is you can live the life you want right now and shore up your finances at the same time. Just split the difference. With your primary income covering your base expenses, cut your passive income in half. Take half of your passive income and spend it however you want. You can buy a car, a bigger house, go on vacation, or spoil your kids or grandkids. The other half of that extra income goes toward the future, such as paying off debt, saving for retirement, or investing in training programs for your career.

This way, you keep yourself motivated to make passive income, but you’re still focused on your long-term financial health.

3. The VA Revolution

As you build your passive income streams, time rapidly becomes the limiting factor. With the demands of your primary job and family, your passive income may not grow as quickly as it could or should.

Thankfully, a combination of global communication and arbitrage has created an entire industry of competent virtual assistants (VAs) who cost less than $10 an hour. You could easily find five hours per week of tasks they could do for you. You’ll give yourself an extra 20 spare hours for the month for just $200. That’s an excellent way to save time at a low price. And as your side-business grows, you may consider spending another $200 for a total savings of 40 hours a month.

The sheer number of VAs out there can make it hard to find a reliable service, but TaskBullet has compiled a list of eight high-quality providers.

4. Rinse and Repeat

We mentioned earlier how passive income is only passive in its later stages. In the beginning, you work, and you work hard. Once it’s rolling, the money comes in with only the occasional checkup. When you reach that point, you have two options.

The first is to enjoy the money. Even if it’s not enough to quit your day job, it’s likely enough to lower your financial stress and allow you to enjoy a few of the finer things in life. There’s nothing wrong with that.

The other option is to do it again. Once your first enterprise is mostly automatic, take that energy you spent building it to build a second passive income stream, then a third, then a fourth – until your income is where you want it to be. Then you can go ahead and do the first option in real style.

5. Re-Investment

Once your passive income grows and reaches a level of self-sufficiency, you can scale your business and earnings by investing income back into the business. A few ideas include:

  • Increasing your advertising budget
  • Offering a product on additional channels
  • Adding variety to your products
  • Expanding into new markets
  • Hiring sales staff
  • Buying materials in bulk to cut production costs
  • Purchasing more shares of stock
  • Buying additional rental units

Each passive income system has different opportunities for expansion. Investing your early returns is one of the best ways to take advantage when your side business is poised for expansion.

6. Partial Retirement

The dream of passive income is to earn enough from these low-demand streams that you can quit your job and live off the proceeds. That’s a high hurdle for some people, especially when you consider the value of your benefits package. It can seem so far off it’s hard to get motivated.

But there’s a way to accelerate your dream of leaving your full-time job: Get your income to a point where you can go part-time in your current job, or move to a new job that’s less demanding, more fulfilling, or both. You can pour the extra time and energy you’ll have into your side business. You’ll earn more passive income more quickly and reach full retirement years before you thought it possible.

7. The Points Game

This technique requires some fine-tuning, and it’s not for everyone. But it’s a surprisingly easy route to free money via your passive income. Here’s how it works:

Step One: Put all of your passive income expenses on rewards credit cards, preferably with an eye to which cards give the best rebates for which kinds of purchases.

Step Two: Always pay off everything within the grace period so that you avoid any late fee or interest.

Step Three: Repeat as often as possible.

With the scale of expenses increasing as your passive income business grows, these rewards will build up faster than you think. Free travel and significant cash rebates will be in your future.

A word of caution: Only try this technique if you’re sure you can reliably pay off your expenses in full each month. Otherwise, interest and other charges can nullify any rewards you might earn.

Final Thoughts

Where to begin building passive income

The best part about these seven ideas is you don’t have to choose between them. Once you have passive income rolling in steadily, you can apply a portion of it to all of these practices. Each one will yield steadily increasing benefits until your life is unrecognizable from what it used to be.

But just like getting started with passive income, it all begins with action. Make a decision, do the work, and move forward today.

Ready to earn with Kickfurther? Fund growing brands’ inventory and profit as it sells. Get started with $10 in credit here: kickfurther.com/get10

6 Reasons to Raise Prices

Posted on by Kaylyn Perry

Reevaluate your products’ margins

When asked what advice he would give to start-ups, Marc Andreessen had one thing to say:  “Raise prices.”

That can seem counterintuitive when you’re trying to grow.  After all, don’t people like paying less for stuff? Many entrepreneurs think like this.

  1. Charge people as little as you can
  2. They’ll tell other people about your product
  3. We’ll grow!

Unfortunately, the reality often doesn’t work like that.  To many businesses, raising prices seems like a shortcut to losing customers. We’re here to ‘raise’ some ideas you should consider when establishing prices.

Reasons you should raise your prices.

  1. Hedge against product risk – What if you got something wrong?  Or what if you got everything right but an engaged customer gives you an amazing idea for version 2?  If you’re running on extremely thin margins, you won’t have the cash you need to iterate on your product design.  Industrial design, new packaging, new graphics, new production molds, production samples, etc. all cost money. You need to be putting cash in the bank with your early customers so you can continue to serve them well.
  2. Hedge against competitive risk – Unless you’re Apple, there are people out there that want your business and can make a legitimate play to steal it.  They are bigger than you and have more money. If they can deploy a similar product to yours and undercut you until you go out of business, your company is dead.  This was the Walmart strategy of coming into town, driving everyone out of business, and then raising prices. They have a bigger war chest; you have to be smarter or have more brand equity.  Having cash in the bank would allow you to run PR, acquire more market share, and potentially expand into other markets. Moreover, if they decide to try and buy you instead of trying to out-compete you, your company will command a significantly higher price if you have better margins.
  3. Offer freebies – Everyone likes free stuff.  Free shipping, giveaways, discount codes, etc.  Customers love to feel like they’re getting a good deal.  There are a lot of fascinating studies on “free” and how illogical humans are about it.  If you have cut your prices to the bone and can’t afford to offer “free” stuff, you’re doing a major disservice to your business, your investors and yourself.
  4. Hedge against macro risk – When you don’t have any room to play with your margins, inevitably you pass it on.  Imagine you’re one of the poor souls who just saw their tariff rate increase from 10% to 25%. If you can’t absorb that cost (even temporarily), your loyal customers are going to get smacked with a 15% price increase or you’re going to be losing money.  If you have enough margin you can absorb the cost increase for a while, or work the increase into a version two release to help justify it. People will pay more, but they won’t be happy if they’re paying more for the exact same thing. This can protect you against everything from changing suppliers to tariff changes.
  5. Increase market share – This seems counterintuitive but you can grow your company faster by charging more.  This is driven by point (3) above, where you can offer special deals to spike growth as needed, and also by paying for customer acquisition.  The best brands on Kickfurther relentlessly re-target me when I check out their pages. This is because they know that someone who has visited their page is much more likely to buy their products than someone who hasn’t.  They have the budget to put their ads in my face, and I’m not ashamed to admit that on several occasions it works well and I end up buying the product after I see it ten times. Instead of hoping a happy customer will share information about your product, you can pay to put it in front of people’s faces… if you have the money, that is.
  6. Increase distribution opportunities – When your brand scales, it is likely that major retailers will want to carry your product.  If they come knocking, their expectation is to make 50% margin when they sell your product. So if they’re buying it for $1, they want to sell it for $2.  If you’re selling the product for $2 and buying it for $1.50 ($0.50 profit or a 25% margin), you can’t sell wholesale and make money. You need to be buying the product for a maximum of around $0.70 if you’re selling it for $2.00 ($1.30 profit or a 65% margin).  This way you can sell it to the retailer for $1 (making $0.30, a 30% margin) and they can sell it for $2 (making $1, a 50% margin). So in short, in order to open up big scaling opportunities you want to have at least 65% margin. I think it’s safe to stick to the double/double rule, which means you double your cost twice to arrive at a retail price.  So you buy for $0.50, sell wholesale for $1 (50% margin), and sell retail for $2 (75% margin).

When reviewing your products’ margins, remember to look at your manufacturer and shipping delivery terms to identify areas for optimization.

Raising prices positions you for growth

When your product is growing rapidly, you’ll find that you need to finance the growth of your inventory.  Selling with a greater margin will enable you to self-finance a greater proportion of growth and enable rapid scaling of your business.

Still want to charge as little as you can?  Let us know what you think in the comments!

Prevent Late Deliveries from Manufacturers

Posted on by Kaylyn Perry

Want to prevent late deliveries? Ask your manufacturer for these three things.

One issue I constantly see plaguing product companies we work with is late deliveries.  You have clients waiting for your products, you placed your manufacturer order a month ago, and now with a week until the delivery date you learn from the factory that your production run will be delayed for weeks.

Production delays happen

At some point every product business encounters this issue.  Even giants like Apple and Tesla have had to deal with this.

Tesla Struggles to Meet Model 3 Deliveries Due to Production Delays

 

https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/Apple-supply-disruption-cost-iPhone-8/447082/

Some manufacturer delays you can’t prevent

Now, not every production delay is avoidable.  A couple of years ago I remember a heat wave swept through China and factories were forced to close as temperatures reached dangerous levels.  That’s not the kind of production delay we’re addressing in this article. This article addresses the production delay where the manufacturer says “Oh no, something went wrong on the factory floor.  Whose production run can I afford to delay…?”.

That does happen. Whether it’s a shiny new client coming through the door and bumping existing orders or another issue causing a cascading delay through the production line, you don’t want your order to be one the factory decides to kick down the road.  Here are three things you should know before paying a deposit, and you should have them in writing.

Arm yourself with these supplier delivery practices

  1. Establish late delivery terms – When Target or any major retailer places an order with you, they will have a delivery date and very punitive terms on late deliveries.  This can range from a 3% discount per day, all the way to the right to cancel the entire order and get any money back they have paid you. If you know ahead your delivery is going to be late, they will often relax these terms because they still want your product, even if it’s a week late (get that in writing too). That being said, they keep the terms in their orders so they have leverage over you.  Plus, in the future if they mess up on something they can leverage that good will with you: “Hey remember when I didn’t charge you those late fees? Now you be nice to us.” You should do the exact same thing with the factory. Get them to agree to onerous late delivery penalties and then if your production is delayed, you can leverage those terms to your advantage. I have personally often had the factory pay air freight for a portion of the shipment to make up time for a production delay.  If they expedite shipping so that I receive the order at the originally agreed time, I don’t really care if there were delays during production. You can also leverage that good will in future events if you ever happen to screw up. Everyone is basically playing the same game.
  2. Quantity manufacturing discounts – This is a softer play but frames your company as a priority client.  If you can stress how much quantity you have manufactured in the past, that is great, but get your manufacturer dreaming about how much business they’re going to do with you in the near future.  If they think you’re a VIP, they will treat you like a VIP, and that means no delayed shipments. Asking them, “Can you please send me the quantity discounts for 10x this order size” subtly frames your business as one that you expect to grow rapidly.  Plus it’s good information to have anyway.
  3. Inspection date – Get a third party quality control firm to manage your post-production quality control process.  Ask the factory for an inspection date and make it clear to them you’re booking this third party firm to arrive on that day for the inspection.  Stress the importance of not having to rebook the date because of booking travel tickets or whatever other plausible reason. If they try to delay your production, bring up the e-mail thread and make a big fuss about how you checked and triple checked and can’t rebook so you need to keep the same inspection date.  Chances are, if you make it annoying (or expensive) enough for them to reschedule your production, they’ll just get it done instead.

View your manufacturer as a supplier

There are always ways to continue to improve, but these tips have helped get factories to perform on time and, when they don’t, make up for it however they can.  If you’re getting terms from a retailer, ask yourself if they can be applied to your manufacturer. Just as you’re a supplier to a major retailer, your factory is a supplier to you and many of the terms can be adapted or adopted.

Custom Labels Entice New Clients To Your Product

Posted on by Kaylyn Perry

You are on your way to success: You’ve finished your initial product runs, you’re building a following, and you’re finally creating wakes in the marketplace. It’s time to secure your success by developing a eye-catching, recognizable brand. Custom labels prove to be one of the most important elements of product branding. In fact, according to a study by the Paper and Packaging Board, a whopping 72 percent of consumers admit that packaging influences their buying decisions.

Whether you’re selling products at the supermarket or selling at the farmer’s market, your goods rely on good packaging to entice your clientele. And good packaging comes down to a striking, clear, high-quality label. So, how do you design a label that boasts your brand and boosts your sales? Successful labels are creative, coherent, and well-crafted — here’s how you can check off each of those traits:

Product Label Creativity Attracts Curious Customers

While clarity and quality are crucial components of an attractive label, it is creativity that attracts curious new clients. Hit the drawing board with striking, distinct designs that are eye-catching, even at a distance.

Now, if you don’t dabble in design, be sure to hire a designer or firm with a reputation for iconic, impactful graphics. Be sure to use the tips below to influence your decisions as you design custom labels.

If you are tackling your product label design on your own, be sure to develop numerous iterations of designs for your labels, until you’ve landed on a label that glows. Try bold colors to gain attention, or consider a subtle, neutral color scheme that relies on the product itself to tempt clients. Go complex if you’d like, designing an odd-shaped label that runs askew across the surface of the package. Or opt for a label that is minimalistic, which can prove alluring, mysterious, and impactful.

Not sure where to start? Take a look at your competitors’ labels, and take things in a new, individualistic direction.

Take note: Regardless of the style that you settle on, you should always build your custom labels around your brand. This will help to promote recognition once clients try your products, and that’s how you earn return business.

Label Clarity Sells Products

Once you have creative concepts drafted up, it’s time to make sure that your label speaks clearly to your clientele. Clients should be able to determine exactly what they’re buying when they pick up your product. Ensure that your custom label addresses basic questions that a client may have — e.g. What does this product do? What are the benefits of this product? Why should I buy this product versus that one? Answer these questions to give your clients confidence in your product.

Legible text is a must. While you may be tempted to use a fancy cursive font for your wine bottle labels, or you may want to go with an archaic font for your old-fashioned shaving kits, you risk losing clients if they can’t read the text in a quick glance. Now, you don’t have to go with standard Helvetica font, but clarity should be a priority.

Finally, don’t overlook compliance. Many products’ labels are legally regulated to ensure they include various warnings and information, so that clients are aware of what they’re buying, how to use the product safely, et cetera. For example, the FDA has extensive regulations on medical device labeling. If your product falls under any regulations and standards, research government regulations and be sure to conform to industry standards. You can speak with a professional compliance agency to ensure that your labels are up to code.

Label Performance Keeps Clients Coming Back

What materials are you using for your label? Once the product is in your clients’ hands, the quality of the label will be apparent. Pay attention to the texture of your label. How does it feel? Does the texture work well with the character of the product?

When customizing labels, the material should also work well with the utility of your product. For instance, if you’re labeling a line of bath products, it’ll be imperative that the labels are waterproof.

Think about where your product will be stored. Maybe you’re labeling your organic sunscreen line. Will the label fade in the sun? Be sure your label not only feels good but is suitable for where and how it will be used. The quality of the label will reflect the quality of your product, making clients eager to return for the whole package.

A Case Study in Successful Beer Branding

Leapin’ Lizard Labels is a custom label printing company that has grown hand-in-hand with neighboring breweries in their hometown of Fort Collins, Colorado — often called “The Napa Valley of beer.” As the beer continues to flow, breweries count on Leapin’ Lizard for label after label.

Odell brewing, one of Fort Collins’ staple brewers, recently made the leap to crowlers (32-ounce cans that are all the rage in the beer industry), relying on simple, effective labels that feature their signature hops logo.

 

City Star labelsMoscow crowler label

 

Meanwhile, just south of town, City Star printed labels for their bottles that are as bold in character as the brew itself. Their most recent line of beers features a rustic, wooden backdrop backing their iconic horseshoe-and-star logo.

Leapin’ Lizard also created custom labels for Funkwerks — a brewery just down the road from the printing company — producing bright, poppy labels to slap on top of their ever-changing tap handles around town.

From Odell’s sweat-resistant labels to textural City Star labels to eye-catching Funkwerks labels, Leapin’ Lizard is proud to support local brewers with labels as enticing as their brews.

Pair labels with custom packaging and packing materials to build brand equity

Ordering Made Easy With Leapin’ Lizard

If you’re looking for a partner in printing, Leapin’ Lizard would be ecstatic to help. Once you’ve designed your labels, they’ll warm up the printers.

With Leapin’ Lizard Labels, printing couldn’t be easier. Here’s their simple, step-by-step process:

  1. Submit your artwork via email.
  2. Review free proofs of your label.
  3. Submit final approval. We’ll print and ship!

Leapin’ Lizard prints in all batch sizes, they print labels in any shape and color-scheme, they provide a variety of label material options, and they’re an eco-friendly printing company. They have no minimums, no set-up fees, and no extra charge for custom cuts or colors. Count on Leapin’ Lizard Labels to make your brand stick — call with any curiosities you may have, or submit your artwork via email!

5 Delivery Terms You Should Understand

Posted on by Kaylyn Perry

I was recently helping a friend buy some products off of Alibaba and it was interesting to see how well he navigated the sourcing task.  He did everything right, but still could have ended up paying thousands more than he needed to. Why? Because he almost overlooked one important item:  The delivery terms.

Delivery terms describe when the manufacturer’s work is done.  These different terms (like “free on board” (FOB) or “free in store”(FIS)) carry very different implications on the delivery process and can range from the manufacturer being responsible for getting the inventory ready on the factory floor to being responsible for the inventory until it is in your warehouse ready to sell, and options in between.  The rule of thumb is that the more the factory must do, the more expensive it will be for you. This is due to two reasons:

  1. Prices fluctuate and manufacturers won’t take a loss – The most noticeable of these is freight costs, which can change weekly.  If the factory quotes $10 and freight ends up being $12, they take the loss. So what the factories will do is build in a margin and charge you $15.
  2. It is work – Setting up and paying for inland freight, export duty, overseas freight, import duty, customs brokerage, and inland freight includes a number of moving pieces and a lot of work.  The factory doesn’t do this for free and builds a margin into each segment, picking up some cash along the way.

How to communicate delivery expectations

Now if you’re small and don’t have a lot of hands on deck, it probably makes sense to reduce your liability and pay a bit more for the factory to take this off your plate.  The bigger you are, the less you will want the factory to do in order to improve your margins and continue to grow your business.

So here are a few delivery terms you should know well in order from cheapest to most expensive.

  1. Ex-works – Ex-works means the inventory is ready to be picked up on the factory floor.  You send your freight forwarder to get the inventory where it was produced. You take care of inland freight, export duty, export customs clearance, overseas freight, import duty, import customs clearance, and (finally) inland freight.  This is the solution that large corporations with sophisticated supply chains most often choose.
  2. FOB – Free on board – FOB means the inventory is on a boat ready to ship to you.  The factory takes care of inland freight, export duty, and export customs clearance.  It is your responsibility to take care of overseas freight, import duty, import customs clearance, and inland freight.  This is the most common option since inland freight, export duty, and export customs clearance don’t fluctuate very much so you end up doing less work and the price doesn’t typically increase a lot from ex-works pricing.
  3. DDU – Delivered duty unpaid – DDU means the factory is responsible for getting the inventory to the destination port but not paying for duty or customs clearance.  This means you are responsible for customs clearance, import duty, and inland freight.
  4. DDP – Delivered duty paid – DDP is the same as DDU, but the factory is also responsible for clearing customs and paying import duty.  You take care of inland freight.
  5. FIS – Free in store – FIS means the factory will get the inventory into your store or warehouse ready to sell.  You don’t handle anything other than paying the factory. This is generally the most expensive option, but can be a viable option for small teams that are strong on distribution and marketing but weak on supply chain operations.

Delivery terms simplified

The more you do, the less you pay.  In the end, my friend ended up buying the inventory on DDU terms and finding a third party customs brokerage firm to handle the import duty, customs clearance, and inland freight.  The factory would have charged him $2,000 more for FIS terms (delivered to his address), but he found a customs brokerage firm that only charged him $500 in fees plus $700 in import duty ($1,200 total) to do the same thing.  He realized an $800 savings by doing more of the work himself.

My final recommendation: unless you are a customs brokerage professional, don’t try to do customs clearance yourself.  Small errors that hold up moving the shipment through the destination port can lead to big demurrage charges (fees for your shipment sitting at the destination port/terminal for longer than is allowed).

Before you can ship, make sure your manufactured product matches expectations with PSS and ISS sheets!