How Parkway Plastics Met the DIY Gift and Packaging Needs of @Shameless.Craves

Why would I need Parkway Plastics?

For this past holiday season I decided that an easy way to save money on gifts for my friends and family was to go the do it yourself (DIY) route with all my gifts. After spending some time on Pinterest searching for ideas, I came across multiple natural recipes for body sugar scrubs. Since I am a natural guru myself, I thought this would be a perfect gift for not only my female friends but even my male friends (guys like soft skin too, right?).

I was immediately hooked on a coffee-scented sugar scrub recipe that I found, and I went to my local grocery store to buy my supplies.

My ingredients included the following: raw sugar cane, brown sugar, oats, coconut oil, and coffee grinds (I bought vanilla flavored coffee, but any flavor will do). I mixed the ingredients in a kitchen bowl and was quickly overwhelmed by the amazing aroma that the mixture was giving off. Unlike the recipe instructed, I did not blend the oats and decided instead to leave them whole within the mix for a more natural aesthetic look. I wanted people to really see the ingredients that I was using.

My first batch of sugar scrub I chose to put the mix in mason jars, but quickly found out that having a metal lid sitting in my shower with continuous moisture was causing the lid to rust. So this is where I found myself being led to Parkway Plastics Inc.

Parkway Plastics not only has a large variety of products to choose from but they continuously keep stock in their white and clarified polypropylene jars and clear styrene jars.

Not knowing what I was doing or where to start, their user friendly website www.parkwayjars.com was beyond helpful. I used the ‘GET STARTED’ tab located on the main menu of the home page and it literally means what it says! By clicking this tab I was brought to a page that helped break down their variety of products by style, size, industry, add-ons, and even sample packs. I decided to go by industry and what do you know, ‘body scrubs’ was one of the categories listed. Instantly I was given a list of their most popular products that many of their buyers use for the same purpose.

Not only did I have a great selection to choose from, but by clicking on the product I was interested in I had instant access to: product pictures, product pricing and minimum order quantities, product specs, shipping specs, line drawings, and label die lines. They even had a section for product reviews by other customers! How awesome!

In the end, I couldn’t decide on just one jar or lid so I decided to get a couple of samples to see what looked best. The samples I chose were:

Regular Wall 63mm – 6oz Clear Styrene w/ Black 63mm Smooth Unlined Cap

Regular Wall 89mm – 4oz Clarified PolyPro w/ Aqua 89mm Smooth Unlined Cap

Regular Wall 43mm – 1oz Clear Styrene w/ White 43mm Smooth Unlined Cap

From what started out as a fun project to save money on gifts turned out to be an overall liberating entrepreneurial experience for product and packaging development. I felt like I started out not knowing anything about how and what I was going to package my product in to quickly knowing everything plus more about my plastic packaging needs.   

Visit @Shameless.Craves on Instagram!