Graphic Novels shipped sustainably with Scotch Cushion Lock / Cory Casoni -Co-Founder CRWN Studios

https://www.crwnstudios.com/

Why is shipping so important to graphic novel collectors?
How has CRWN studios innovated to more sustainable packaging?
What does CRWN actually stand for?
How have Cory and Meg made a big impact on this industry with their services?
This episode is sponsored by Scotch Brand https://www.scotchbrand.com/3M/en_US/scotch-brand/cushionlock/?utm_medium=redirect&utm_source=vanity-url&utm_campaign=www.scotchbrand.com/cushionlockholiday

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/packaging-today-show/id1656906367

Join Us Live Daily on LinkedIn Or YouTube or listen at your leisure on Apple or Spotify 

Packaging Today Podcast 

https://open.spotify.com/show/6dksVwqEFVDWdggd27fyFF?si=e924995740f94e19

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cory-connors/

I'm here to help you make your packaging more sustainable! Reach out today and I'll get back to you asap.

This podcast is an independent production and the podcast production is an original work of the author. All rights of ownership and reproduction are retained—copyright 2022.

Transcript

Cory Connors: 0:15

Welcome to Sustainable Packaging with Cory Connors. Today's guest is Mr. Cory Cassoni. He is a co founder of CRWN Studios. How are you, sir? Doing well. How are you doing, Cory ? Good. Nice to meet somebody that spells their name right for once.

Cory Casoni: 0:29

Amen. I'm so tired of all the extra letters and the wrong

Cory Connors: 0:33

letters. Everybody likes to add E's and I's and Y's. Well, tell us about yourself, sir. what's your background? How'd you get into this

Cory Casoni: 0:41

business? Oh, wow. how did I get into this business? the pandemic, is the short answer. so I, started in comic book publishing and I worked at, Oni Press, which is, a big comic publisher, published a little comic book called Scott Pilgrim. That's, became like a movie and now it's an anime and all that stuff. Yeah. And, when I left Oni, I went to work at, Namco Bandai games in Tokyo. And, when I left Namco, I struck out on my own and I said, I've worked with a lot of creators. I've worked with a lot of publishers. I think that maybe creators can do a lot of this stuff themselves. I really believed in technology and I thought, there's a lot that publishers provide, but I think a lot of creators can do something differently. I started preaching this idea of a creative middle class to a lot of people. And, my co founder Meg Maiden and I, we started, talking about like how do we get creators to do this themselves using technology and that sort of stuff that had become was becoming available on the Internet, things like crowdfunding and, drip services, Patreon and package deals and that kind of stuff. And we had started a. creative share space, in a, the historic Ford building in Portland, Oregon. And at the time it was the front of house was a bunch of desks and we had creative people working there. They, you would rent a desk and that was your space. And then Megan and I would do the business y part of it. So you could spend more of your time creating. And part of that was running online stores and fulfilling packages for people, helping people crowdfund through Kickstarter and, setting up their subscriptions through Patreon. And the key to us at the time was having multiple kinds of people. There had been share spaces before we're in Portland, Oregon. There had been share spaces before in Portland, but many of them were like laser focused on one. Industry. Often it was like, here's a room full of designers, here's a room full of game makers, here's a room full of animators, here's a room full of comic artists, and we really wanted to diversify that setup, so we had encouraged a lot of people to get in the space and mix, and, it was great for quite a while, and then this, thing called COVID happened, and I don't know if you heard of it. I have, yeah. Yeah. Frustrating. So. Within a couple of weeks, we went from a big thriving community to a giant empty room, with, a big lease to pay. So, Meg and I remember specifically, we were sitting there looking at each other going, what are we going to do? the bills are not going to stop coming. we're going to have to... figure this out. And the one thing that was still functional was, packaging and shipping. And we had been for years encouraging people, diversify your income streams, have an online store, do that sort of stuff. And the biggest holdup for most people was if I do that, I have to take time away from the creative thing in order to do run the store, do the fulfillment, communicate with customers, that sort of stuff. So Meg and I said, look, this is a thing we can do socially distanced. So we can convert this whole room into a warehouse. Essentially we'll just move all the desks into a corner, set up racking, it'll become a warehouse. We'll help you set up your store. Amazon got overrun with people needing essential services. Brick and mortar completely shut down. Everybody we had worked with, some people we had worked with for 10 years that we had been trying to get to do online stores. And these are businesses, they're big publishers. They just wouldn't do it. And when the pandemic hit, they just went, ah, why not? Brick and mortar is closed. Like I'm not selling anything. So if you guys think you can do this, go ahead and do it. and I would say within three months or four months, we went from that office space to a 10, 000 square foot, 20 foot ceiling warehouse, four bays, full office. I, we had to move, we had to transition immediately. And, We were able to staff up and we were able to just start, working. I don't want to call us a 3PL because that's a very specific thing. Yeah. we're more of a client services. We're still really laser focused on helping creators spend more time creating. And now it's not just creators, it's creative businesses. A lot of our clients now are like. Publishers and toy makers and game makers. And, they want to make the thing, they have a B2B retail connection, but what they're lacking is that B2C in the middle. And mostly because. If you're a business, doing that sucks. no one wants to do that. You have to hire staff. You have to have a space you have to do, packaging materials. It's a lot of work. and that sort of has become our bread and butter. we still do full vertical stuff. We still help people manufacture things. We still help creators brainstorm and, Shopify stores. But I would say the vast majority of our work now is in the realm of. of, fulfillment of stuff comes in the door and then we make it go out the

Cory Connors: 5:32

door. It's a, it's incredible what you've built in a very short time. So congratulations to you and your team. I'm totally impressed every time I come to your facility cause I'm in Portland too. Yeah. I'm excited to see what new things are, out and about here in this. It's in this industry that you've, defined, is the phrase comic book a bad phrase or do we call it graphic novels?

Cory Casoni: 5:57

No, I, there was, so graphic novels, if you want to get into the history of comics, graphic novels, it became, it was a marketing terminology that, that the industry needed to. Tell people that the format, the medium of comic books was not just for kids, that it's a, it's a medium, not a, not necessarily a genre, and it's a thing that everybody can read and enjoy, and that, at this point, you can call it whatever you want, you can call it comics, you can call it graphic novels, it doesn't, it's medium, it doesn't matter, right, it's a, it's it's painting. It's just, it's a medium of expression. It's all

Cory Connors: 6:31

art. It's a creation,

Cory Casoni: 6:32

right? yeah. so I don't think there was a time a while ago when people would get very persnickety if you used one term over the other, but I think that time is gone. I think now we just call it what it is. Well, that's great.

Cory Connors: 6:43

Yeah. So you're fulfilling orders mostly in your facility there and you use a lot of packaging. An

Cory Casoni: 6:50

incredible amount of packaging. Yeah.

Cory Connors: 6:53

Let's talk about that. you've gone, we've been able to transition to some more sustainable alternatives. I'm excited to learn about that. You want to walk us through some of that

Cory Casoni: 7:03

process? That was something. So we've always done. trade shows, B2C trade shows, and that would be like San Diego Comic Con is like the biggest one we do, right? But we also do Gen Con, we do all the Penny Arcade Expos, that kind of stuff, we have clients to go to all those shows. And even before we were doing the stores and the shipping, the packaging, a thing that Meg and I had really noticed was how much trash is generated at those shows. if you want to get, if you really want to kick in the pants, go to a trade show and go to the back dock. And it is just dumpster after dumpster. And I don't mean like small dumpsters. giant 30 foot long trash compactor style dumpsters. And they're mostly full of plastic because to get to a show, you've got to ship your stuff there. You got to get it on the floor. It's coming in on pallets. The only way to deal with that really is to wrap it in plastic. There's not, and it's a single use plastic, right? So we had always had in the front of our mind, Oh, this is wasteful. We want to try and Get to shows in different ways. we've figured out ways to drive to shows. We figured out ways to, rent trucks and caravan, multiple, multiple clients to shows in one truck so that we don't have to necessarily wrap stuff. we're trying to figure out ways, like how do we make this cheaper, both in terms of fuel and plastic use? So that was always in the forefront of our mind. And then when we pivoted heavily into running stores and doing fulfillment, it like, It's so hard to not do plastic tape, plastic fill bubble wrap, especially when you're shipping books, we ship a lot of books, big, heavy hardcover books. And. consumers don't want those to get banged up, right? So if you're huge, if you're an Amazon or whatever, and you have a warehouse in every city, you don't have to think about that much. You can put it in a paper bag and you can send it and it's going two or three miles and who cares, right? but we have a facility in Portland, Oregon. Well, technically we have a partner warehouse in Australia and a partner warehouse in the UK, but the vast majority of our stuff happens here. In Portland, Oregon. we've thought about expanding to other facilities in Indianapolis or, in Florida, a couple other spaces to try and do shorter amounts of distro, but at the end of the day, it doesn't behoove our clients to do that. So we don't, that's a personal ethos of ours is yeah, it'll make us more money, but it'll cost our clients more. And we don't, there's not, we haven't found a way around it yet, basically. Right. So. How we got connected was our next step was like, how do we do this in such a way? How do we, I believe when we first talked to you, it was about how do we design a box that can help us ship a hardcover book so that we don't have to fill a standard box with a bunch of packages? and I think we're still working on this, but I think we've devised a way, a flat fold way that the book is protected without us having to put any dunnage in it at all whatsoever. And we're still experimenting, but I think, I really think we're close, Corey. I think we're almost there. I do too. Yeah. I, and it's, I think it's going to change the way people ship books. it is, it's exciting. It is exciting. Yeah. And there are some publishers that have similar, they've got those, what are those things called? Where they like squish the books together through two. You don't know.

Cory Connors: 10:24

Yeah, cohesive material.

Cory Casoni: 10:26

Yeah, the cohesive things where the book goes through the machine and sucks it together and you cut out the sides. Yeah, that kind of works. I've received books like that. They still get a little dinged up. But with what we've worked on, if you're from the comic book world, it's very similar to what's called the Gemini mailer where you put a single comic in the middle of folds around and encapsulates the book entirely. So you don't have any dunnage in there and it's rigid enough. It won't get folded. The mailman won't fold it in half. And then on the ends of it, there's a little bit of space, about an inch off of either side so that it can be dropped and get a little ding, but the it's like the book is floating in the middle. It's held in the middle of this protective area. That's how we first got connected. And I still, I think we're going to get there. our hope is that by mid next year, we've converted entirely away from square boxes and we're in this realm of fold over stuff because so much of what we ship is so similar and we're unique in that situation. It doesn't solve the problem right now. Right, right. and you were the one who had said to us, you should check out this 3M stuff. I don't, I, be honest with you, I don't even know what it's called. We just ordered it by the roll.

Cory Connors: 11:34

Scotch cushion lock, yeah.

Cory Casoni: 11:36

Cushion lock, yeah, okay. It's how do I explain it? It comes on a roll. It's got a honeycomb pattern. When you pull it, it opens and it's meant to replace bubble wrap. I brought some with me. Cause you would ask me like, how are you using it? So I actually brought a box with some in it. I don't know if you were, if you video record this as well as audio reports. Yeah,

Cory Connors: 11:55

we'll show

Cory Casoni: 11:56

clips. Yeah. So here, I can hold it up so you can see it. So it's this stuff. It comes on a roll. And when we, when you open it, it turns into this expanded area. And we've been able to entirely replace bubble wrap with this stuff. Awesome. pound for pound and cost wise, cause a lot of what we do, it has to be cost. it is slightly more expensive, but we use so much less of it that, and that it's made it better for us. Like we're not creating the single use plastic waste. it's paper

Cory Connors: 12:25

and saves money. That's wonderful. And it

Cory Casoni: 12:27

saves us money. Yeah. and again, this is a, you have to understand we ship 20, 30, 000 books a year, right? So it's like for us, it's easy to say it saves us money because we get to spread that over this huge thing. I think if you just ordered a bubble bag, you'd probably be a little less expensive, but, but yeah, we've really found it to be helpful and we're finding weird ways to use it too. The intention is that you wrap something in it. So we have occasionally we'll ship some breakables, some glassware. We just did a whole set of them, like coffee mugs. And we were able to roll the coffee mug in it. And that was great. but what they want us to do is wrap a book in it. And what we found is that we can use even less of it. By pulling it off and balling it up and putting it in the corners almost like a foam corner block So now we've replaced two products That we don't have to use at all and both of which are, you know Effectively a petroleum product because you've got those foam squares which are crazy expensive by the way and have to be cut to shape and we've replaced a bubble bag And what we're finding is that our customer service tickets haven't gone up. Like we have about the same number of people saying my book is damaged. And generally speaking, when the book is damaged, it comes down to a postal issue, not a packing issue. But we find that most of the time anyway, and it's not even that postal workers or, courier services are bad. It's just that these boxes go through a lot between point A and point B. They have a long way to go. so yeah, I mean that has been a real game changer for us in the way that we package our materials. And I think if, if we get to the place too, with these kind of flat full boxes working on, that'll change it again, even further where the single books we'll be able to put in those and the boxes where we have multiple books, we'll be able to corner them or to wrap the book entirely in this product. It's pretty great stuff.

Cory Connors: 14:10

It makes me so happy that's worked for you and the Scotch cushion lock solution is truly innovative and I think you're exactly right. moving to more sustainable packaging is it's a progress. it's a progression of. Trial and error. It's, like you said, at first you looked at it and maybe the cost per square foot is a little bit more, but when you don't have to, use as much, all of a sudden, wait, this is it. This is a cost savings and our customers will like it more. have you had any feedback from anybody saying, Hey, this is pretty cool

Cory Casoni: 14:45

stuff. no, not really. This is what's interesting is because we're using this and there was another new product you introduced it to. We're using both of them right now. And, we haven't heard from anybody. what a weird, interesting thing, but we have heard from clients, our customers have said that was really well packed. So I think to me that translates as. Them opening this thing and being like, whoa, that's weird. And then, because they're used to getting either like crumpled paper, pushed in around the sides, like in a horseshoe shape or bubbles on bubbles or peanuts just everywhere. And, which is another, potentially sustainable option that there are some biodegradable, peanuts that you can use, but it requires. An overhead, it comes with big bags, it takes up a ton of space, and a warehouse as tight as ours, you've been in here, it ain't, we're the Willy Wonka's factory of nerd stuff. it's not, we don't have space for bags and bags of bubbles. Right.

Cory Connors: 15:41

Has that been a big, help for your team, having this, product that's flat when it

Cory Casoni: 15:46

arrives? Yeah. this stuff comes in rolls. but it's so easy to store,

Cory Connors: 15:51

unexpanded, that's what I didn't mean yeah, it,

Cory Casoni: 15:53

yeah, I can't say enough about it. It's what's nice is I'm not going to blow smoke. It's not a product we use on every shipment. but we don't use bubbles on every shipment either. So, but it is a product where it's Every time we get to a fulfillment where that book means a little bit extra, or, there's four heavy hardcover books in that box. Our two options are split the books up. So now we've got two shipments. Customer hates that obviously, because they have to pay for shipping ties twice. Client hates it because now they have two potential CSs. We hate it because we got to touch it two times. Or can we package this in such a way where it's. Not changing the weight that dramatically because I think that's the other thing and I haven't weighed these but I would bet money this product is a lighter than plastic than, than packing corners and bubble. I honestly don't know, but I would, my gut says, and I touch a lot of boxes, my gut says this is a lighter product. It just, there's more air in it for lack of a better way of explaining it. the plastic, a bubble wrap can only have as much air as you purchase for it. You purchase bubble wrap based on the size of the bubble and that has air forced into it. you can also do, there are machines where you can do the bubbles that come out and you have to fill every bubble as it comes out of the machine. There are biodegradable versions of that as well. the setup is expensive. The machine is expensive. we've looked at doing that before versus a product like this. It's time consuming, you start, you get to where you just have a, you have a part timer who's just doing nothing but like sitting in a machine pumping bubbles all day long. and then you have this. bin of bubbles. And there are machines that automate it, but, we're a small business. I don't know that I want to invest in those machines right now. Right.

Cory Connors: 17:39

That's like you said, you want your customers to be able to focus on creativity. Yeah. you want to be able to focus on shipping and, logistics and handling all of that, rather than making bubble wrap.

Cory Casoni: 17:52

Yeah. it's the only way. Right. So yeah, it's a cool product. It's cool. Thank you for introducing

Cory Connors: 17:57

us to it. Well, I'm thankful that you like it. I, we've had a lot of very positive feedback from it and a lot of great success stories. So I wanted to focus on yours and in your really cool company. My, my son's an avid, graphic novel reader. So he's a big fan of what you do. Oh, that's great. I told him I was interviewing you. It's Oh, those guys are great.

Cory Casoni: 18:20

it's not us. It's all the people we work with. We just get the books to you. So,

Cory Connors: 18:25

so any big launches coming up that you can tell us about or anything that you want to

Cory Casoni: 18:29

highlight right now, we're just finishing fulfillment on, we work with a company called Goodman Games. They make some books called Dungeon Crawl Classics. I think they have another Kickstarter running right now, so we do the fulfillment for all the Dungeon Crawl Classics stuff. That's cool. Udon Entertainment, one of the publishers we work with, they, have a, special edition of, the Elden Ring art book, which is available in the U S for the first time. If you want a box that comes to your door with cool packaging, that's what I would say, because it, we made a custom box for that one and had it done at the printer. So the, it's a two book set. It's very heavy. And it comes with the boxes like pre built so that we're literally just pulling it off the pallet and slapping a label on it. And that's, I think that's a really good example of the kind of things that we do here. yes, that was more expensive in production of the book, but we've got huge savings on time, energy, dunnage, and just so much we're saved on when we don't have to, how do we get this book in this box? and not have it be destroyed when it arrives at its final destination. So having them pre packaged with recyclable cardboard. I believe the cardboard is already recycled cardboard. So it's probably at this point, it's probably done. You're probably not going to do anything with it after this, but it's definitely going to biodegrade. It has one piece of plastic tape on the entire box. and it's that's it. it's folded over inside. It's got ridges around the inside and then the top has a, has like a link fold. And then it's one single piece of tape. I don't have to do anything to it. Put a label on it out the door.

Cory Connors: 20:07

That's really nice. And a lot of, are your consumers, keeping the packaging as a keepsake often

Cory Casoni: 20:13

for something like that? it's interesting, not for that, but we have heard from, Joseph Goodman at Goodman Games. He has told us in the past that they've done some custom packaging. And what they found is they had to, Put the custom packaging in another package because the consumer wanted to keep the custom packaging. So that's a, that is sometimes a problem is the customer is like, Oh, I love that. I love that box. And they want to keep it. And you're like, no, it's a shipping box. They're like, Oh, but it has all this cool art on it and stuff. So, yeah, we have had that in the past, but it's not been a problem lately. The real

Cory Connors: 20:47

fans have to have every unique thing, right? The

Cory Casoni: 20:50

box fans. Yeah, it happens.

Cory Connors: 20:53

That's excellent. Anything else you wanted to tell us about your company or, the things that you're doing there?

Cory Casoni: 20:58

No, I don't think so. we're very, we just very quietly plug away. And, it, I would say, check out the creators we work with. If you want to, if you want to check somebody out, I'm just warehouse. I put things in boxes. Like you need to go look at those other people.

Cory Connors: 21:11

What's the best way for, those creators to get in touch with you?

Cory Casoni: 21:16

oh, for creators to get in touch with us? Yeah. Yeah, we have a website set up, it's, crownstudios. com. It's C R W N studios. com, crown with no O.

Cory Connors: 21:26

What's the impetus

Cory Casoni: 21:27

of that? when we started our studio, this is the first time I've told this story publicly. when we started

Cory Connors: 21:36

our studio. We're getting exclusive. Yeah, it's true. It's true.

Cory Casoni: 21:39

we had a share space and everybody in the share space, wanted the space to have a name. And, Megan and I, as the co founders were like, ah, we got to file paperwork. We don't want to just, we don't want to be, Meg and Cory studios or whatever. Like we, it's, we need some kind of name. So we had a blackboard wall and we told everyone there, start writing names on the wall and we'll come up with something. And there were a lot of really good names. And, it was just months were going by and Megan and I were like, we have. Taxes to file. Like we have to have an EIN. We got to get registered. And, in the, we had a group chat set up for the whole, the whole space. And I finally just said to everybody, like looking at, we got to pick a name. I don't know, I don't care what it is. We just need some kind of creative, random workplace name for the space. And somebody in the group said, that's perfect. I love it. I said, what do you mean? And I said, creative, a random workplace name.

Cory Connors: 22:31

So now that's awesome. So

Cory Casoni: 22:34

I registered the business as CRWN studios and we've been creative random workplace name ever

Cory Connors: 22:38

since. I love that. That's wonderful. I could like to have a t shirt that said that

Cory Casoni: 22:44

yeah, so that's the, the secret origins of our studio name of creative random workplace name.

Cory Connors: 22:49

Well, that's wonderful. Thank you, Corey. I really appreciate your wisdom and your partnership. It's been really fun working with you and your team. Absolutely.

Cory Casoni: 22:56

Thank you, Corey. Thank you for having me. Now, if I don't get back to this pick line, my, my Packers are going to kill me, so I need to get you to hop off here in a

Cory Connors: 23:03

minute, we'll let you get back. Thank you, sir. Really appreciate your time, Corey.

Cory Casoni: 23:06

Thank you so much.