Fixing a packaging problem that was sending back more than half the orders

The situation

His Clinic is an online prescription service for men’s health. Over 50% of orders were being returned because the medication arrived damaged. For a prescription brand built on discretion and trust, every broken order was a cost, a delay and a reason for a customer not to come back.

Finding the real cause

Rather than guess, I followed an order through the whole fulfilment process, from the warehouse and the courier through to what customers reported when it arrived.

Two things stood out:

• Orders were shipped in a postage bag with only the flimsy original medical box inside.
• The damage customers reported had a pattern, and cross-checked against how couriers handle parcels, it pointed at the packaging as the weak point.

The constraint

Regulations require blister packs to stay in their original packets at all times, so the medication itself couldn’t be repackaged. The fix had to balance production cost, customer experience and the brand.

The solution

We created a structural insert box to hold the medication packets, used together with waterproof postage bags. To get the size and strength right, I used real order data: typical order sizes, ordering patterns and paper weight.

The structure was tested against the handling it would get in transit before it went into use.

The result

There have been no returns due to broken blister packs since.

What it shows

Packaging isn’t only how a product looks on a shelf. For a health brand shipping direct to customers, it’s part of the service, and getting it right shows up straight away in returns, costs and trust.