Your Guide To Unboxing Videos & Using Customized Packaging To Create One

As an eCommerce seller, the first physical touchpoint you normally have with a customer will be when your product package arrives at their door. In this critical moment, how can you ensure that you capture the customer’s attention so they remember you in a positive light?


Shipping your best products in a plain, boring brown box is not enough to keep up with the marketing efforts of retail giants. Generic packaging isn’t engaging, memorable, or personable. Modern consumers demand a better customer experience. If you can’t give it to them, they’ll simply find a competitor who can.

So, in such a fast-moving industry saturated with competitors selling similar products, eCommerce sellers need a new way to differentiate themselves. A premium, personalized unboxing experience can be that key differentiator! In fact, when a customer has a memorable experience with your packaging, they’ll want to share it with others. This encourages YouTubers and other social media influencers to create unboxing videos.

So, what’s an unboxing video? How can one benefit your eCommerce business? What are some great YouTube Channels to follow for box opening videos and how can you start your own unboxing video YouTube channel? We answer all these questions and more!

What Is an Unboxing Video?

what is unboxingAn unboxing video is just that: a video recording of someone opening up a box that they then share with others.

Lots of YouTube content creators have unboxing videos as a part of their channel to act as smaller, easier-to-film content pieces between their other projects. Others have turned unboxing items on camera into their primary form of content on their social media platforms, providing viewers with reviews of products and their unboxing experiences. 

Unboxing videos can be as varied as the products inside the box. Some creators specialize in a particular genre of products (like games/toys, car parts, or mail-order snacks) and rarely showcase anything else. Some creators have set structures to their unboxing videos, providing consistent critique and advice for their viewers as they go. Others may have a more free-wheeling style, trying to make the unboxing experience as much of a surprise as possible and not sticking to a set process.

The Benefits of a Branded Unboxing Experience

There are many benefits to providing your customers with a personalized and branded unboxing experience. Here are a few of the biggest ones:

Increased Visibility and Brand Reach

When people notice a totally unique box standing on a doorstep, standing out against a sea of generic packages, they're bound to become intrigued. This makes them more likely to check out your website or social media channels to see what you’re all about. 

Plus, delivering a great user experience can make your customers so excited about your brand and its products that they’ll be much more likely to share photos of their new package online. In fact, 40% of online shoppers say they are more likely to share a product image or video on social media if the packaging is branded. This trend is only going upwards as social media becomes even more prevalent in the purchase process of modern consumers!

Opportunity to Attract New Customers

Unboxing videos have become a major trend among online influencers (such as product reviewers) and have the potential to persuade their fans to purchase your products. By using custom packaging, you’re not just satisfying your existing customers – you’re helping attract new ones, too. A survey from Dotcom Distribution found that premium packaging makes a brand feel upscale and builds up anticipation for delivery.

The bottom line? Custom shipping boxes can attract new customers and turn your business into a recognizable brand. If you can create an interesting, unique, and entertaining unboxing experience that drives customers to share a video of it, you can help their followers discover your brand. It can also encourage people to buy from you because they want to participate in that awesome unboxing experience that they saw on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc. from their favorite content creator.

Encouraging New and Repeat Sales

By generating extra excitement for your brand among influencers’ followers, you can attract new customers that might never have considered your products otherwise. Unique unboxing experiences can also help keep your current customers satisfied with the products they buy from you—helping to ensure repeat business.

Repeat sales from existing customers plus new customers who saw an interesting unboxing video = more revenue for your brand!

Providing a Better Customer Experience

Modern consumers want to buy from brands they feel they can have a deeper, long-term relationship with. They’re not choosing to buy products based on price or features alone—they’re buying into the brand behind them. So, it’s no longer enough to just offer quality products. 

Consumers want to associate with brands that they actually like or feel a connection with. For this reason, brands that make a point to effectively engage with consumers throughout the entire purchase journey are more successful. This has caused a shift from focusing on products to focusing on developing customer experiences and brand associations. 

Building Long-Term Brand Loyalty

What happens when your customers feel a personal connection to your brand? They’ll want to keep buying from you again and again—without any interest in even looking at the competition. Today, 43% of customers say they will spend more money with brands they’re loyal to. This is so important because generating repeat business with a satisfied customer is a much faster, easier, and less expensive process than convincing someone new to buy from you for the first time. So, using custom packaging to deliver a user experience that better satisfies your existing customers is incredibly valuable.

Unboxing Video Statistics You Need to Know

There are those who will dismiss the importance of unboxing videos. But before you join the “unboxing videos are stupid” crowd, here are a few unboxing video statistics that you should know:

  • 20% of Consumers Have Watched an Unboxing Video. According to an article by Medium, “1 in 5 consumers have watched an unboxing video.” Getting influencers to do a box opening from your business can have a major impact when it comes to getting your product out in front of potential customers.
  • 20 Million Search Results. According to a report by YouTube Insights, as early as 2014, there were “more than 20 million search results on YouTube for ‘unboxing” (Here’s the download link for the report PDF).
  • 2 Billion Monthly Users. An article by Variety notes that YouTube, the “Google-owned video behemoth now counts 2 billion monthly unique users globally” and that “Watch time of YouTube on TV screens was more than 250 million hours per day as of March 2019.” In short, the potential audience for unboxing videos is massive.
  • $26 Million. Also according to Variety, “The highest-paid YouTuber is 8-year-old Ryan Kaji, who made $26 million between 2018 and 2019 for his unboxing videos.” This demonstrates just how lucrative the unboxing video space can be!
  • Brand Discovery on YouTube. According to a Think with Google article, “Nearly two-thirds of shoppers say video has given them ideas and inspiration for purchases, and more than 90% of those say they’ve discovered products and brands via YouTube.” How much is the chance to be discovered by new customers worth to your eCommerce business?

The 5 Best YouTube Channels for Unboxing Videos

youtube unboxOkay, so you’ve decided that you want to try to get your products featured in a YouTuber’s unboxing videos so you can help promote your brand and increase brand awareness. Which is the best YouTube channel for unboxing videos for you to try to get featured on? The answer is: “It depends!”

Not every YouTuber is the right fit for every eCommerce business—and a YouTube channel simply being big doesn’t make it an ideal fit for your business. It’s important to consider brand suitability when trying to find a YouTuber to create unboxing videos for your business. This means considering things like whether they use harsh language or if their target audience has some overlap with your own target audience.

With that in mind, here are some top YouTube unboxing channels (or channels with unboxing videos) to consider:

1. Unbox Therapy

With an estimated 17.8 million subscribers (as of January 2021), Unbox Therapy is a channel with a ten-year history of sharing “a variety of videos showcasing the coolest products on the planet.” Tech gadgets are a common feature on the channel, and they have amassed over 3 billion views according to their YouTube stats.

2. Ryan's World

This teeny titan of the unboxing video world is one of the highest-paid YouTubers for a reason. The Ryan’s World channel features not only unboxing videos, it has fun animation videos, simple science experiments for kids, and other educational content as well. Those interested in how to do unboxing videos for a younger audience right could learn a lot from this channel

3. UNBOXING Fashion & Sports

UBOXING Fashion & Sports is a channel that specializes in, well, unboxing videos for a variety of fashion and sports apparel (quite frequently shoe brands like Nike or Adidas). Videos typically feature a close-up of the reviewer taking products out of the box and moving them around while text highlights important product features—all set to music that is catchy without being distracting. With 15.6k subscribers and a strong focus on sports apparel, this YouTuber knows how to cater to a dedicated market.

4. Unboxing Sve

Unboxing Sve takes a look at tech, gadgets, and personal apparel ordered from online sites and provides viewers with rundowns of their features and how they work. With 5.52k subscribers and over 2 million video views, Unboxing Sve has a respectable audience and presence on YouTube that can help boost awareness for the products he reviews.

5. Tech Unboxing

At 702k subscribers, Tech Unboxing may not be the biggest content creator on this list, but it's definitely no slouch. The channel is all about high-tech gadgets and isn’t afraid to be fairly scathing about the products being reviewed. In addition to unboxing videos, the channel also hosts frequent giveaways of tech products that the host likes that other tech enthusiasts may enjoy.

The channels listed above are just a small sample of the thousands of content creators on YouTube that feature unboxing videos—you could spend days sorting through “Unboxing videos YouTube” results pages and not come close to discovering them all and their specialties.

How To Create an Unboxing Experience

unbox lady-1

Creating a unique unboxing experience that people will want to share (and one that encourages people who see the unboxing video to make a purchase) can be tricky. However, there are a few simple things that eCommerce sellers can do to create a superior branded unboxing experience:

Use Fulfillment Marketing To Get Personal

Getting to know your customers is a must for creating a memorable and positive unboxing experience. It’s important that you’re able to answer questions like:

  • Are your product’s buyers male or female (or a roughly even mix of both)?
  • Where do your customers live?
  • How did customers discover your product? (e.g., online ads, website, influencer video, etc.)
  • How much do your customers spend per purchase?
  • How often do your customers order from you?
  • Is there a special event coming up for your customers, such as a birthday, anniversary, etc.?

Fulfillment marketing leverages these kinds of insights about your customers to help you personalize packaging contents to create a custom unboxing experience that makes a positive impact!

For example, if you know that a repeat customer has a birthday coming up in the next few weeks, you can add a customized coupon to their package congratulating them and offering a discount on a future order. This helps to build a relationship with the customer while creating a more meaningful and memorable customer experience. It also helps incentivize the customer to buy from you again—driving revenue from repeat sales.

Fulfillment marketing is great for eCommerce sellers because it:

  • Combines fast shipping, transparency, and customization without sacrificing scalability. Being able to deliver this level of personalization at mass volume is incredibly valuable! Why? As of 2017, 88% of U.S. marketers reported seeing measurable improvements due to personalization, with more than half reporting an increase greater than 10%.
  • Increases the likelihood of gaining repeat customers. 80% of customers say they are more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand that provides personalized experiences, and 80% of those who classify themselves as frequent shoppers only shop with brands who personalize their experience! So, if you want to build a happy customer base that is loyal to your brand long-term, an epic unboxing experience can help you get there.

Use Branded Packaging To Tell Your Story

A key part of creating a memorable unboxing experience that makes customers think of you and your brand is making the packaging your own. If it’s not clear at the first glance who the packaging is from, you lose the potential impact of a strong first impression. In short, it’s important to let your brand’s personality and story shine through just from the box itself!

Having strong brand storytelling doesn’t just increase your favorability in your customer’s eyes—it can also be as much as 22 times more memorable than simply telling facts about your products. In an industry as saturated as eCommerce shopping, any chance you have to stand out from the competition is priceless.

How do you create strong brand storytelling with your product boxes? A key part is being able to quickly establish a “narrative arc” complete with a setting, characters, conflict, climax, resolution, and denouement (post-resolution bit establishing a new normal). Doing this with printed images on the box and a few short lines of text—and being able to trigger an emotional response with them—can be incredibly effective.

Ensuring that your branding and user experience is consistent for the customer – from browsing products on your website to receiving one – helps build a recognizable brand story. Once your audience knows, trusts, and likes you, they will be more likely to buy from you because you’ve created a deeper relationship with them, turning them into loyal advocates for your brand.

Remember To Think Inside the Box, Too!

“Think outside of the box” is a common bit of advice for creating unique and memorable experiences. However, it’s important to think about the inside of the box too—literally, in the case of unboxing experiences!

When it comes to crafting an unboxing experience, your presentation inside of the box can be every bit as important as the outside of the box. Lazily throwing your product into the corner of a shipping box isn’t going to build the cohesive, positive, and curated image you (and your customers) are looking for. In fact, such carelessness can contribute to damaged products!

So, it’s important to think about the size and shape of the product, the boxes you are using, and how your products will fit and look when a customer opens their box. Some brands will even add messaging and designs inside the box as a nice surprise for the customer.

To further elevate the customer experience and add a feeling of exclusivity, you could put a little something extra inside your boxes aside from packing peanuts and airbags! For example, you could add:

  • Free samples of other products similar to what the customer purchased.
  • Recommendations for complementary products that can offer additional value for the customer, creating upsell opportunities by making customers aware that you offer other things that they need.
  • Coupons that encourage additional purchases. Discounts and coupons are a top-ranked tactic for driving customer loyalty. In fact, 61% of consumers say they “relied heavily” on coupons or discounts in 2018.

There are millions of eCommerce businesses out there that are all competing for the same consumers' attention. This means your brand needs to be able to stand out in order to be truly successful long-term. These add-ins can all help you build long-term customer loyalty and drive repeat sales!

How To Star in Your Own Unboxing Videos

making unbox videoDo you want to create your own unboxing videos for others to find? Do you want to introduce your customers to your products in your own YouTube Channel so you have complete control over your messaging and the content of each video?

Here are a few tips to help you star in your own unboxing videos:

1. Get a Good Camera & Video Editing Software

While you probably don’t need some super high-end camera that professional Hollywood filmmakers would use to film 8k+ ultra-HD movies, you do need a good camera that can capture high-definition footage (preferably at least 1080p, as that’s the current standard for high-definition streaming). This helps give your unboxing videos just enough of a professional look to not turn off potential viewers.

In addition to a camera, make sure you have a decent tripod or another stand for it. This way, you don’t have to try to hold onto it yourself (or have an assistant hold it) while you’re filming your box-opening videos. This reduces camera shake, which helps make the video easier to watch.

Video editing software is a must for taking all of your video recordings and compiling them into a cohesive video that will be compelling for viewers to watch. There are plenty of free video editing tools to choose from, as well as some paid options that may have useful features.

2. Prepare Your Stage/Photo Lightbox

Lighting is key for a great unboxing video. If you look at some of the popular unboxing channels listed above, you’ll notice that a lot of their unboxing videos are shot in a prepared space where there isn’t much (or anything) in the background to distract from the product being viewed.

Oftentimes, this is an empty table or a “photo lightbox” (a small container with a smooth white backdrop that helps improve lighting while eliminating shadows for making photos look more professional). Lightboxes can also be useful when you’re taking pictures of your products to put up on your eCommerce website, so it’s a good idea to make (or buy) one that can fit your products.

3. Practice Making Videos

Before you start uploading videos to YouTube, take some time to practice making your unboxing videos using already-opened products or random items. This way, you can work on setting up your camera and stage, keeping the product in focus, narrating your unboxing video, editing footage to eliminate “dead air” where nothing is being said or done, and more!

When you’re done creating your first test video, play it back and watch for issues like objects being out of focus or excessive “ums, ahs,” and other sentence fillers. Don’t worry if your first video isn’t perfect—that’s what practice (and your video editing software) are for!

4. Don't Waste Your Viewers' Time

If you’re making an unboxing video, make sure you get to the “unboxing” part quickly! As noted by Expert Voice: “remember that you are competing for viewers’ attention with dozens of other videos. Keep your introductions brief and get to the unboxing quickly.” If you take too long to get to the unboxing part of your unboxing video, you risk losing your audience’s interest and them clicking away from your video before you can showcase your product.

5. Mix Things Up Once in a While

If all you do is unbox your own products, you might quickly run out of videos to make. Without new content, you may find your YouTube channel losing traction. So, try to mix things up once in a while—like the Ryan’s World channel mentioned earlier.

Creating other kinds of content, such as advice and how-to videos for specific products, simple news and product updates, or even short promotional bits can help keep your publishing frequency up.

Just remember: everything you publish should still be related to your brand and your channel’s core content in some way to avoid losing your audience—viewers may unsubscribe if the content you put out isn’t what they subscribed to you for!

6. Promote Your YouTuube Channel/Video on Social Media

If you’re making YouTube videos, odds are that your eCommerce business is active on other social media channels, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Taking advantage of your audience on other social media channels to promote your YouTube channel can help you quickly earn some easy subscribers and help you better promote your products to your existing followers.

So, take some time to promote your new product/unboxing videos on your other social media channels—even something as simple as “Hey, check out my newest video on YouTube!” with a link to the new video can help promote and grow your channel.

Elevate Your Brand with Unboxing Experiences Using Custom Packaging

To recap, a memorable, engaging, and personalized unboxing experience helps you:

  • Differentiate from Competitors
  • Amplify Your Brand’s Reach
  • Build Brand Recognition
  • Better Satisfy Current Customers
  • Attract New Customers
  • Drive Additional Revenue
  • Enhance Your Customer Experience

Ready to experience all of these benefits so that your eCommerce business can gain a competitive edge? The Fulfillment Lab is here to help! We bring fulfillment and marketing together at scale—combining expedited shipping, order transparency, and complete customization to keep you and your customers happy.

How does it work? Our fulfillment team will meet with your marketing team, helping you to create a few customized fulfillment experiences for each unique customer profile. Using analytics within our Global Fulfillment Software™, you’ll quickly be able to pinpoint which experience your clients like the most. Then, you can upgrade and refine your packaging to align with the preferences of each customer!

With nearly limitless options for customization when it comes to boxes, labels, inserts, coupons, and more, you can maximize profitability while keeping it fresh and exciting every time someone buys your products. Contact us today to start creating an unboxing experience that will transform your customer’s experience!Unboxing-Customer-Experience


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