Forget about high-tech features. If you’re making hardware you will find yourself talking more about the packaging and labels.

Over the years I’ve been involved in dozens of hardware projects. If I totted up all the meeting time most of it will have been discussing cardboard and stickers. I’m constantly bemused that regardless of a project’s complexity and all the main risks and issues that the most talked about things end up being stickers and boxes.

I once warned the COO of a start-up that we would spend more time talking about the product’s packaging and labels than anything else. He laughed. A year later we were still talking about them. He’d stopped laughing.

There is a reason why these two areas are the most talked about parts of a project.

Stickers first. Don’t let their simplicity fool you. Labelling is a serious business because:

• If you leave out or put misleading info on a product’s label you can get into hot water
• If a label is too small and needs to be bigger it can wreak havoc with your design
• If a label is made from the wrong materials it won’t pass certain regulatory testing

And that’s before we’ve even talked about style of the label; fonts, logos, colours, normal or reverse print, metallized finishes and barcodes. You’d be amazed at how many people want to weigh in on the label design.

Packaging is no easier ride. Simple bits of flat brown corrugated cardboard are folded into mind-bogglingly complex origami. The packaging has to protect your product from the factory all the way to the end user against moisture, dust and heavy handed couriers. If it’s a critical part of the user experience then it also needs to look good too.

If you are developing a new product and haven’t yet thought about stickers and cardboard then drop me a note. It’s all I seem to talk about!