A case pack is the smallest quantity of one SKU a shop can buy, and the physical box that quantity travels in. Wholesale trades in cases, not units, and almost every operational decision downstream — pricing, freight, picking, forecasting — inherits whatever number you choose here.
Most DTC brands pick the number first and worry about the box afterwards. That order is backwards and it shows up as broken product, awkward pallets and a case that costs more to make than it needs to.
Pick the count from sell-through, not from your carton
The right case count is roughly what a small independent shop can sell in a month. That is the number that gets reordered rather than marked down, and reorders are the entire argument for the channel.
For a twenty-four dollar candle in a gift boutique, that is usually six. For a six dollar chocolate bar it might be twelve or twenty-four. For a hundred and twenty dollar ceramic vase it is two, or even one, because no small shop is putting six identical vases on a shelf.
Two sanity checks before you commit. Multiply the case by your wholesale price and see whether two or three cases clears your minimum — if a buyer has to order eight cases of one scent to reach two hundred dollars, your case is too small or your minimum is too high. Then imagine the shelf: six of one scent looks like a range, twelve of one scent looks like a warehouse. The count question on its own is covered in case quantity, and how buyers read the number is in case pack.
Design the inner pack before you buy a carton
Once the count is fixed, the inner pack is the thing you design. It has one job: deliver the units intact and let a shop assistant get them onto a shelf in one movement.
What that needs in practice:
- Separation. Dividers, moulded pulp, or trays for anything glass, ceramic or painted. Product touching product is a claim waiting to happen.
- A weight one person can lift. Aim below fifteen kilograms for anything a single shop assistant will carry. Heavy cases get dropped, and freight carriers surcharge them.
- Square dimensions. A case that is roughly cuboid stacks. A case that tapers or bulges does not, and it will get crushed under whatever sits on top.
- An obvious opening side. Mark it, or design the flaps so there is only one way in. Box cutters ruin product through the wrong face more often than any other transit damage.
Only when the inner pack exists do you size the master carton, and then you size it to fit a whole number of inner packs with no gap. Buying the outer first and padding out the difference is how brands end up paying freight on air.
Do the cube arithmetic once
Cube is volume, and freight is priced on it as much as on weight. Ten minutes of arithmetic now saves money on every order you ever ship.
Take a case of six candles measuring thirty by twenty by fifteen centimetres. Four of those cases make a stable block of sixty by forty by fifteen. Stack eight of those blocks and you are at a hundred and twenty centimetres tall on a standard pallet footprint, which is thirty-two cases, or a hundred and ninety-two units, on one pallet. Now you know what a full pallet of your product is, which is the number a distributor will ask for in the first conversation.
Write these four numbers down somewhere you can find them: case dimensions, case weight, cases per pallet layer, cases per pallet. Every freight quote, every routing guide and every distributor conversation asks for some subset of them. Wholesale shipping picks up from here.
What goes on the outside of the case
An unlabelled brown box is the single most common amateur signal in a first wholesale shipment. The case has to be identifiable without being opened, by someone who has never heard of your brand.
Minimum markings on at least two adjacent faces:
| Marking | Why |
|---|---|
| Brand and product name | Finding one case in a stockroom |
| SKU and variant | Two scents in identical boxes get mixed up |
| Units per case | The shop counts cases, not units |
| Carton number, as 1 of 3 | Proves nothing is missing on delivery |
Add a case barcode if any of your accounts scan at goods-in, and add handling marks — this way up, fragile — where they matter. The barcode side of this, including what number a case barcode should carry and how it differs from the unit barcode, is in wholesale labels.
Mixed cases, assorted cases, and when to allow them
Sooner or later a buyer asks for two of each scent instead of six of one. The honest answer depends on how you pick.
Allowing mixed cases makes the order easier to sell and every part of fulfilment harder. Somebody has to open inner packs, re-pack a new configuration, re-label it and get the counts right. If you are picking orders yourself on a kitchen table, that is thirty minutes. If a warehouse is picking for you, it is a per-unit charge that eats the margin on the order.
A workable compromise for a small brand: sell by the case, but offer one pre-built assorted case per range. You build it in production, it has its own SKU and its own barcode, and the shop gets variety without you improvising. Anything more flexible than that should wait until volumes justify it, and by then you are usually into the questions in wholesale fulfillment.
What a case pack costs, and how to keep it honest
Run the numbers for one case before you order packaging in quantity.
Six candles at seven dollars landed cost is forty-two dollars of product. The inner carton with dividers might be a dollar twenty. The outer, if the case ships alone rather than on a pallet, adds another dollar. Tape, label and void fill, call it forty cents. So the case costs about forty-four dollars sixty to put together, and it sells for seventy-two.
That packaging line, roughly two dollars sixty per case, is worth attacking once and then leaving alone. Buying inners in a thousand instead of a hundred usually halves the unit price. Dropping a printed shipper for plain corrugate with a good label saves more than the print ever earned. What it is not worth doing is shaving the dividers, because a broken jar costs you the product, the freight, the replacement and some part of the account's confidence.
The broader packaging stack around the case — primary, inner, outer, and what retail-ready means — is in wholesale packaging.
When a buyer wants a different case than the one you built
It will happen, usually from a larger account with a routing guide. They want twelve, or they want a shelf-ready tray, or they want the case under a specific weight.
Treat it as a pricing conversation, not a favour. A bespoke case means a separate SKU, separate packaging stock, a separate line in production and a separate forecast. Either the volume justifies all of that, or it does not. A small brand that says yes to four different case configurations for four accounts has quietly quadrupled the complexity of every order it ships for the rest of the year.
If you are still deciding which kinds of shop you are building cases for, that is worth settling before you order a thousand inner cartons. Paste your product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers that stock similar products — a range going into grocery needs a different case to one going into gift shops.
Questions brands ask about case pack packaging
Can the case pack be one unit? For high-priced items, yes, and buyers expect it. Just make sure the single-unit case is still packed to survive a pallet, not a doorstep.
Should every SKU have the same case count? Where the products are the same size, yes — it makes picking, pricing and forecasting simpler. Where sizes differ, match the count to the shelf, not to consistency.
Do I need a barcode on the case as well as the unit? Not for small independents. Start adding one when an account asks, or when you begin shipping pallets rather than parcels.
What if my product is an odd shape? Design the inner pack so that the case is cuboid even when the product is not. The pallet does not care what is inside; it cares whether the boxes stack.