Case 006

the case files of new york art detective

Walter Lin P.I.

Packaging!

April came in quiet, but it didn’t stay that way. The month’s been a grind, a long stretch dedicated to one thing: packaging. The kind of job nobody thinks about until it’s staring them down, demanding answers you don’t have. Protection of work, branding, postage weight, size versatility, environmental impact, cost—it reads like a checklist of regrets waiting to happen. And me? I’ve spent weeks wrestling with it, trying to pin it down.

A friend gave me a tip—bubble wrap. Not the flimsy kind, but soft-lined, furniture-grade. Furni-Soft, they call it. Good stuff, solid, but plastered with branding that felt wrong for framed art. I swapped it out for Globe Packaging’s own-brand alternative. Same softness, less noise. The kind of wrap that does the job without shouting about it.

I thought about dressing up the wrap—screen printing, spray painting motifs—but neither stuck. Too fiddly, too much work for too little payoff. That’s when the parcel tape came into play. Bright colors, bold lines. It wasn’t fancy, but it felt right. Clean, simple, effective. A quiet win in a long game.

The boxes, though, that’s where the real headaches started. Finding the right size was a wild goose chase, full of false leads and dead ends. I toyed with making my own, even considered pizza-style boxes for a hot second. Eventually, I locked down the standard frame size. But for the larger, square-framed pieces? It’s been a game of trial and error, joining boxes together to make the fit work. I’ve started screen printing a dot design directly onto the boxes, along with a protective slip insert—branding and padding rolled into one. A necessary compromise in a case full of them.

Corners were the next snag. I tried recycled foam protectors—purpose-made, supposedly perfect. They weren’t. Wrong size, wrong feel. I sent them back and went old school, cutting my own out of recycled cardboard. It’s not glamorous, but it gets the job done.

By the end of it, I’ve built a system—a packaging ensemble that feels like a triumph, or maybe just a temporary truce. White acid-free tissue paper, colored acid-free tissue paper, card for the print face, soft-lined bubble wrap secured with colorful tape, a cardboard insert, a tight-fitting silkscreen-printed box, corner protectors, and a bright polythene postal bag. A lot of moving parts, but they fit together, more or less.

The packaging’s ready. The work’s safe. The branding’s sharp. Now it’s up to the recipients to tell me if all this effort means something, or if it’s just another drop in an endless ocean. Either way, the job’s done, and the shadows can have their rest—at least, for now.

packaging printed with own design