Packaging is an important part of marketing your product. When the Gobo Green marketing campaign was started we looked at our packaging and how it could be “greener” and be used as a tool for storage. Recently we started looking at some gel pieces laying around and began playing with packaging ideas. With the gel packaging you could re-use the gel sheet we sent the gobo in. Our test gel packaging squares were 6 1/4″. What are your thoughts on this? Would you re-use the sheets of gel? Do you currently use the plastic sleeves as a storage tool? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
October 12th, 2011 on 12:00 pm
From a dealer point of view, I don’t like it. We keep our gobos in the envelopes in a card catalog. Easy to flip through and show customers without any worry that any small pieces may get bent or otherwise misshapen. If they were packaged in gel, we would open and throw away the packaging and then find another envelope to put it in for customers. At least with the clear envelope, we know customers will be able to re-use them if necessary.
October 12th, 2011 on 1:05 pm
I agree with David. What might be cool though is some sort of “3 ring binder” better yet one of those desk calendars with the two holes so that when you get your gobo it will fit nicely into some binder. The best storage device I ever saw was a old 3.2 floppy disk binder/sleeves. This particular binder formed its own box.
October 12th, 2011 on 1:57 pm
I would agree with the first commenter – those sleeves are quite useful and go a long way towards protecting the gobos, both in the shop and in transit to / on the job site, and back!
Now, if you could come up with a way to manufacture the sleeves (in their current size) OUT OF recycled pieces of gel, that might be useful AND green! (or red, or blue, or….)
October 12th, 2011 on 5:46 pm
The 3″ floppy pages is what we use. We have over 30 binders full of gobos all categorized by type, even the customs. We made a bulk purchase of the 3.5 floppy sheets before they became extinct.
We have been sending the current plastic sleeves back to Apollo in an attempt to recycle them. The last batch was over 600! Maybe a dealer return for deposit program would work, credit toward your account type thing.
October 12th, 2011 on 6:07 pm
I don’t use the plastic sleeves – I send them back to Apollo in bulk. I only save the plastic ziplocs to protect the glass images. For over a decade I have been using Avery 3.5 Disc Storage Pages. Four slots per page with another slot above each with a piece of paper for notes. I record what I named the gobo, when it was produced and my PO number. Makes tracking them down for duplicates easy before Apollo printed the sales number on each custom image. You can fit lots of metal gobos in each slot or up to 3 B&W. I divide the pages into 3” ring binders by theme (Foliage; Cityscapes; Corporate Logos A – L, etc). This helps protect and preserve the images for repeated use. Major problem – Avery does not make the heavy duty disc storage pages anymore!! Maybe Apollo can!
October 12th, 2011 on 6:17 pm
Great feedback, keep it coming.
October 13th, 2011 on 3:30 pm
I appreciate the feedback. I hope to get some additional comments over the next few days. In the mean time I will order some humble pie for the weekend. My preferred flavor is a strawberry rhubarb.
October 22nd, 2011 on 4:41 pm
A 3-ring binder sheet would be the ideal storage solution for my stack o’gobos, but their plastic sleeves will do for now.
Why not experiment with a laminate press and see if you can’t make them out of gel?