Microcosm launches custom shipping boxes

Microcosm has created its own custom shipping boxes, featuring a spoof of a certain Seattle-based company’s logo and images of several employees’ cats, produced by International Paper based in Memphis, Tennessee. Microcosm regularly receives feedback from its bookstore customers praising its warehouse shippers’ packing skills, so it only seemed right to get boxes to match their acumen—and to express Microcosm’s cheeky and fiercely independent ethos anywhere its books are sent.

Maybe you even glimpsed our new boxes (and a few of our titles!) in the recent CBS Weekend News piece on fighting book bans, featuring the amazing Fabulosa Books.

Says Microcosm founder Joe Biel, “We created custom boxes, and the paper plant we’d been working with in Oregon refused to print our anti-Amazon artwork. Our number one customer complaint was our use of boxes from ULINE—a company that doesn’t align with our values anyway—so we switched to custom boxes that are of a superior quality in celebration of how many booksellers praise our warehouse employees’ box-packing superpowers.”

Biel and Microcosm vice president Elly Blue discuss the decision making, design, and Oregon vs. Ohio politics behind the new boxes in this recent episode of Microcosm’s People’s Guide to Publishing podcast.