CMPL: Boxcraft showcases influencer-ready rigid boxes

When Mahipal Choudhary launched Boxcraft in August 2022, he was filling a gap he had observed over twelve years of working inside the packaging industry. Large converters in Gujarat and Delhi were well equipped to handle volume orders, but start-up brands needing 500 to 1,000-boxes at a time were largely being turned away. "There are big groups, big companies," he said. "The start-ups, whose quantity is 500 to 1,000-pieces, they don't get attended to. So I started a start-up to fill that vacuum."

It was a deliberate and considered move. A graduate in print and packaging, Choudhary spent over a decade in employment before striking out on his own, and the insights he accumulated along the way are clearly visible in how Boxcraft has been built. By targeting early-stage brands with lower minimum order quantities, the company has grown alongside its clients, several of whom have scaled their volumes into the lakhs while remaining with Boxcraft through that journey. "In their start-up, I made 500 to 1,000 boxes for them," he said. "They have scaled up with us too."

The numbers tell a compelling story of reduced dependency and accelerating diversification. In its first year, 80% of Boxcraft's revenue came from a single client, the personal care brand Mcaffeine. Today, the company counts 20 to 30 brands in its portfolio, and that original anchor client accounts for just 10% of turnover. The bulk of the business sits in personal care, cosmetics and the perfume segment, markets where packaging plays an outsized role in brand perception and shelf presence.

The operational transformation over the same period has been equally striking. When the company launched from its 13,000-square foot facility in Haryana, all processes beyond basic fabrication were outsourced, with even the initial fabrication line purchased second-hand. Four years on, every process has been brought in-house, and the plant now operates at a capacity of 10,000-rigid boxes per day. The client roster has grown to match, with ITC's Engage perfume range and Denver among the brands Boxcraft has onboarded in recent years.

At CMPL 2026, it was the company's promotional packaging concepts that attracted the most attention at the stall. Among the pieces on display was a grenade-shaped rigid box developed for the Wow brand, designed to accompany a product launch campaign. The box, built to resemble a military-style grenade, was created specifically for influencer outreach at the start of the product's campaign cycle. Choudhary explained that it is a format that speaks directly to the growing importance of unboxing as a marketing moment, where the packaging is as much a part of the campaign as the product itself.

Promotional packaging, by its nature, demands creativity within tight timelines and for limited runs, precisely the kind of brief that a converter built around flexibility and responsiveness is well placed to handle. For Boxcraft, it is an area that sits naturally alongside its wider rigid box offering, and one that Choudhary appears keen to develop further as the brand's reputation in the personal care and fragrance space continues to grow.