The cheapest logo in the world
Stamps, stickers, or pre-printed boxes? We priced all three ways of putting your brand on a package, honestly, and one of them is not like the others.
Somewhere around the fiftieth order, every small brand has the same thought: this package should look like it came from us. A plain kraft box does the job, but it does not say anybody's name.
There are three ways to fix that. Have your packaging printed with your design. Order custom stickers and seal every parcel with one. Or buy a rubber stamp and print the logo yourself, box by box, at the packing table.
All three end in a branded package that looks intentional. What separates them is what they cost, when the money leaves your account, and what happens the day you want to change something. We went and priced all three properly, and the honest numbers are stranger than the marketing ones.
The honest math
First, the assumptions, in the open. Prices move and vendors differ, so here is exactly what we are comparing, using typical published prices from mainstream suppliers as of 2026. Say you ship 500 packages a month, 6,000 a year.
| The branding method | What it costs |
|---|---|
| Rubber stamp on a plain box or bag. A custom logo stamp (~$30) plus an oil-based ink pad (~$10). A pad is good for thousands of impressions; call it 10,000 to be conservative. | ~$40 first year |
| Custom stickers, one per package. Around $0.15 to $0.25 each for a 2-inch sticker at 500-unit quantities. We will use $0.18. | ~$1,080 per year |
| Pre-printed mailer boxes at roughly $2 to $3 each in small-business quantities, versus about $0.70 for the same box plain. The branding premium is the difference: about $1.30 per box. | ~$7,800 per year |
Per package, that works out like this. Hover over the bars for the working.
Branding cost per package shipped
Same box, three ways to get your logo on it
That is not a rendering error. The stamp bar really is that small: roughly 27 times cheaper than the sticker and nearly 200 times cheaper than the printing premium on a custom box.
And over a full year of 6,000 packages, the gap stops being a percentage and becomes a number you could put toward stock, ads, or a very good holiday:
first year total
every year
every year
Your numbers will differ with volume, size, and vendor, and bigger print runs bring per-unit prices down. Run the same three-line math with your own quotes; the ranking survives almost any realistic inputs.
The costs that never make it into the calculator
The per-unit price is only half the story. Anyone who has actually ordered custom packaging knows where it hurts, and it is usually not the unit price.
The minimum-order wall. Custom printing gets cheap through volume, which means suppliers want commitment: often 500, 1,000, sometimes several thousand units per size, per design. For a small brand that is real money leaving today for packaging you will ship over the next year, if your product, your logo, and your box sizes all stay exactly the same. Packaging folks call the gap between "too big for DIY" and "too small for print minimums" the MOQ dead zone, and most growing brands live in it for years.
The spare-bedroom warehouse. A thousand mailer boxes is a wall of cartons. Storage is a cost even when it is only measured in the corner of your flat you can no longer use, and cash sitting in cardboard is cash not sitting in inventory that sells.
Design lock-in. This is the quiet one. The day you tweak the logo, add a website, launch a rebrand, or simply spot a typo, every pre-printed unit on the shelf becomes waste you already paid for. A stamp treats your design as replaceable: new artwork, new stamp, about thirty dollars, and the blank boxes you already own do not care.
Lead times. A custom print run takes weeks and slips when supply chains do. A stamp brands its first box the day it arrives, which matters more than it sounds the week before a launch or a market.
"Pre-printed packaging asks you to predict the future and pay for it in advance. A stamp lets you brand the package you are actually shipping today."
To be fair: when the other two win
An honest comparison names the cases where the stamp loses, and they exist.
Stickers win on glossy and awkward surfaces. Poly mailers, laminated pouches, shrink wrap: surfaces where ink cannot bond, a sticker sits happily. They also do full-colour gradients and photographic detail, which no stamp will give you. Many brands run both: stamp the kraft, sticker the poly.
Pre-printed boxes win at scale and on complexity. If you ship tens of thousands of units, per-box print pricing falls hard and the unboxing can include printed interiors, edge-to-edge colour, and finishes a stamp cannot reach. When a print run costs you less than a warehouse assistant's afternoon, print.
And the stamp's honest weakness: it is a hand process. Each impression takes a second or two and carries the small variation of a human hand. On a kraft box that variation reads as handmade, which is usually the point. If your brand needs to look like it shipped from a fulfilment centre, the wobble works against you.
For everything else, which is most small brands most of the time, the mark wins on every axis that matters: cost, flexibility, speed, and storage that fits in a drawer.
"But doesn't stamping take forever?"
The most common objection, and the easiest to test with a stopwatch. One impression on a box takes one to two seconds once the pad and stamp live at the packing table. Peeling a sticker off its backing and placing it straight takes about the same, often longer. Fifty orders is under two minutes of stamping. And unlike the sticker, when you run out you re-ink instead of re-ordering.
Two habits make it effortless: keep a foam mat or folded cloth under the box so the surface gives slightly, and stamp a batch of boxes in one sitting rather than one at a time per order. Flat, empty boxes stamp faster than packed ones.
Your questions, answered
- How many impressions does a stamp actually last?
- A well-made wood-mounted stamp with a polymer head survives tens of thousands of impressions. The ink pad is the consumable: expect thousands of impressions per pad, then a few dollars to re-ink or replace it.
- Will a stamped logo look professional enough?
- On kraft, cardboard, and paper, a crisp oil-based impression reads as deliberate and premium precisely because customers recognise a human did it. The failure mode is not the stamp, it is a smudged impression, which the right ink and two seconds of even pressure prevent.
- What can I stamp besides boxes?
- Paper bags, tissue paper, mailers, cards, tags, napkins, egg cartons, cups, muslin bags, fabric with the right ink. One mark across every surface is what makes a small brand look coherent.
- What about coloured or dark packaging?
- Dark kraft takes dark ink poorly; use a white or metallic pigment pad instead. Test on one box before the batch, always.
- Does the ink smudge on boxes?
- Water-based ink can sit on coated surfaces and smear. An oil-based, quick-dry pigment pad is touch-dry in seconds on kraft and cardboard and survives handling and shipping.
If you want to run the experiment, our packaging and paper bag stamps are made for exactly this: your logo, deep-etched, wood-mounted, ready to brand whatever you ship next.
The most expensive thing about branding a package is deciding your design is finished. Stickers charge you for that decision monthly. Printed boxes charge you for it a thousand units at a time. A stamp charges you once, and then quietly gets on with it, two-thirds of a cent at a time.