Eyeliner Boxes.

Pencil, liquid or gel pot, and the brief has to settle that before any dieline work starts. A pencil carton is six inches tall on a footprint barely over half an inch, a liquid liner is a short tube, and a gel pot is a squat wide jar. Nothing about one carton transfers to the next.

If the range spans all three, expect three separate dielines and three separate print runs.

Because 18pt bows over a six-inch span on a narrow footprint, and a bowed carton looks damaged on the shelf. At that aspect ratio the board is genuinely load-bearing, so we spec 20pt SBS for pencils as standard. Liquid liners and gel pots have a far kinder ratio and 18pt holds them fine.

A sharpener changes everything. It needs its own cavity, which widens the whole footprint and takes the carton back to a fresh dieline.

Down one long panel, set lengthwise, rather than across four narrow faces. A pencil carton gives you around 15 square inches, which is enough room for the list at standard type size. Turning the text to read along the length is the only way it fits cleanly.

We lay that panel out first and let the artwork work around it.

Matte lamination on black-core board. Matte makes deep blacks read as dense instead of grey under shop lighting, and a black-through-the-caliper board means the die-cut edges do not flash white. Hot foil for the brand name runs vertically along the narrow panel, using the format instead of fighting it.

For metallic and glitter shade ranges, cold foil takes CMYK on top and gives a coloured metallic that hot foil cannot. Spot UV over a drawn liner stroke suggests a wet finish.

Roughly 0.6 by 0.6 by 6.0 inches for a pencil, 0.8 by 0.8 by 4.5 inches for a liquid, and 1.8 by 1.8 by 1.2 inches for a gel pot. Those are internal figures and they change with the cap. Wooden pencils vary in length by supplier, so we measure the actual pencil with its cap on before cutting.

Auto-sharpening caps and pot lids with a brush add height that a nominal size chart misses.

500 per format and per print version. A pencil carton and a gel pot carton are different dielines, so each carries its own minimum even inside one range. We take orders up to 100,000 units.

Shade ranges on one format can share a carton if the shade is shown on a swatch label or a small printed patch, which keeps the versioning down.

Around 7 to 10 business days after the proof is approved. Need them sooner and a rush run at 5 to 7 business days is usually possible. Samples take 5 to 7 business days too, and a blank sample is the only reliable way to check that a pencil carton stands straight on 20pt.

Sample costs are credited back on the bulk order, and we ship to every state.

Yes, black-core board is dyed paper fibre and recycles with ordinary paperboard. Matte lamination over it is a film, which most kerbside streams will still accept on a carton but which does break a strict single-material claim. If that claim matters, a matte aqueous varnish gets close to the same flat black without the film.

Metallised board is the exception. The foil laminate is hard to recover, so keep it for shade ranges where the shine is the point.