Ever since My Pillow Pets founder Jennifer Telfer started promoting her now famous “As Seen on TV” product Pillow Pets, her company has stressed the product’s dual purpose as a pillow and a stuffed animal. Dual-purpose products can be attractive to buyers because of their versatility. This, in turn, can offer a cost savings by replacing two items with one. Plus, the investment can be easier to justify when considering the product’s various uses.
Along those lines, reusable packaging systems now are serving dual purposes as transportation cases and retail-ready displays to pass on similar cost savings to their users. “Reusables provide a more cost-effective platform for packaging,” says Trent Overholt, vice president of Rehrig Pacific Co., Los Angeles. Because the reusable displays can be used again and again, the cost of creating the displays can be spread out through the multiple trips, compared with one-time-use displays that are not reused, he says.