Custom tins box by China professional manufacturer
Custom tins box is a great option to help your products stand out on the shelf or on the listing in your website.
To help customers who have customized requirements for their tin boxes, we prepare this ultimate guide, from here you will have the most comprehensive knowledge to customize a tin box.
Table of Contents
What is a custom tin box?
A custom tin box is different to a ready-to-ship tin box, which means more details to confirm before you can place the order, and also takes many more days to produce the tin boxes.
What can be customized for a tin box?
To keep us in the same page, a bit of tin Anatomy knowledge might help smooth the communication process of custom tin box
First, the tin box shape, from round, rectangle, square to irregular such as book shape tins, tree shape tins, or you name it, these are all can be customized, but with extra tooling/mold fee.
Second, the tin box structure, like the lid type, the body join bottom type, the bottom, you will have rich options to customize, like hinged lid, sliding lid(rectangle only), the screw top lid (round shape tin box only), and etc.
Third, the special finishes on the surface, for the color, you can choose no printing(original white tinplate color), CMYK color, the pantone color, all final printing results can be mat or gloss(shining) effect.
Debossing or embossing, these two surface handling techniques are often used to enhance the logo or your brand, to make your tin box packaging more eye-catchable. But there are almost no limitations on what can be debossed or embossed. You can add a debossing or embossing pattern to our existing round, rectangle tin boxes, at a minimum extra cost(for a small piece of mold).
With window or not, for any custom tin boxes, you can add a window on the top(like custom tins for watch packaging), or on the body (like windowed coffee tins), this is a great feature to catch the consumer’s attention because they can see the actual products through the clear PET window.
How to control the budget of customizing a brand new tin box?
In short, if you have a loose budget, you could customize tin boxes according to your imaginations, almost anything you can think of, and the major cost of customizing a tin box comes from the shape and dimension customization. So, what we recommend is to add some customizations based on our existing tin box structure, shape and dimensions, this will help you save the brand new tooling fees.
What is the general process to place a custom tin box order?
- Discuss your packaging requirements with our packaging experts, do you have a specific dimension? Or you can just tell us your volume requirements, what kind of products you want to container, do you have seamless requirements?(like candle tins)
- Confirm the dimensions, shapes and structure;
- The design, what information you need to put on the surface, what’s the position? What is the final result you are looking for? During this step we also support a 3D mock-up, for better confirmation;
- Customizing a tin box sample based on our discussion, this process generally takes 7 to 15 days;
- Shipping you the samples of tin boxes customized;
- Whether to fine-tune with your feedback;
- Place the production order of custom tin box;
- Get a pre-production sample before bulk production;
- Customized tin boxes ready to ship.
Why choose Goodyou as your custom tin box manufactuer?
Here we listed some reasons that help you desicions when you looking for a custom tin box manufacturer from China
- Multiple automatic production lines and dozens of manual worker custom tin box producing lines
- Rich experience in offering custom tin box solution for customers alll over the world
- Thousands of existing mold set to save you a lot of cost
- Free samples
- Customized mold refund policy
- Free 3D mockup service
- No excuse after-sale service
- Reorder discount
1.1 Common Tin Box Tin Can Printing Methods
CMYK and PMS are two major ways to print on the surface of the tin cans or tin boxes, sometimes, we will mix them together to get the desired effect our tin packaging customers looking for.
And methods like transparent oil, golden oil, play as extra protection layer to the printing, to get rid of the scratches or hurts done to the printing directly, and also can extend the shelf life of the tin containers in a wet and high-humidity environment, delay the rusting problem.
For glossy looking or matte looking is the final result you can opt to after all the printing coatings are applied on.

CMYK Printing
CMYK printing, also called full color printing, or 4 color printing, is to get the final printing via adding Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black color together;
Pros: Cheap
Cons: Not accurate as PMS, Can see pixelized effect when looking closer.

Pantone PMS Printing
Pantone prints using a “spot color” method which means each individual color is printed one at a time, not mixed together like CMYK. The more colors you have, the more spots are needed. Ultimately, you pay for the number of colors you use, making it great for simple branding designs.

Transparent Oil Overlay
This is kind of "default" printing option for tin can tin box interior surface, this oil is applied on the surface of the tinplate directly, to prevent the tinplate from rust further more.

Golden Oil Overlay
Golden oil overlay is similar to transparent oil coating, the only difference is the color apperance, some customers prefer this gold color to get a premium golden looking.

Glossy Looking
This is one of the most used tin box surface printing effect for custom tin boxes, tin cans, this will give the container a shining looking when exposed in a rich light environment, which can catch the customer's attention better.
Cos: It's easy to leave finger prints on the surface, since its shining features.

Matte Looking
On the contrary, not liking Glossy Looking printing, matte effect can be applied to tin box tin cans with a matte surface, which means, no shinning reflection on the surface of tins, to give the tin a clean looking.
Pros: easy to take high resolution photos of the product, since there is no need to handle the reflection and less post production works.

Matte Over Glossy
This is a mix of the glossy and matte printing on tin box tin can, from this printing method, you can achieve a dominated matte surface and some area(like logo, text or details) with glossy looking, to differentiate these particular area from the matte area;
First the glossy coating will be printed on, than the matte coating is applied above the tinplate, and the target glossy areas are filtered out when printing.
1.2 Special Surface Coating Methods
Below methods are less used than common printing methods listed above, but these special coatings do have their places when your products needs a unique design.

Random Scater Golden Oil
You can achieve a leather texture effect with golden oil coating on the tin box surface, this will give your packaging a classical appearance.

Wrinkle Effect
Similar to previous one, this printing method will also apply a gold oil but with a wrinkle texture applied to the tin can surface.

Rubber Oil - Non-slip coating
This coating is usually applied to tin box products which needs to be non-slip, like tin metal rolling tray, the feeling touching on the surface with rubber oil is like touching on a rubber surface, you can feel the softness.

Luminous effect
Just as the name interpret, by adding the luminous material to the ink, the final tin box can have a luminous effect in dark light environment.

Diamond
If you want something shining, eye-catching, this diamond on the can surface is exactly what you want, the diamond are attached on a sticky sheet, then the sheet with diamonds are cut into the shape, then wraped on the surface of the tins.

Shining Sparkles
This shining sparkles are suitable for products which need some area to be shining with sparkles, the sparkles can be multiple colors.

Glitter Powder Effect
Glitter powder or glitter sparkles are another way to make your custom tins stand out on the shelf.
2. Custom Sticker Labels
Using sticker labels is another way to add designs to tin boxes or tin cans, generally, sticker labels are choosen for no printing plain tin boxes, with a original color(either silver or gold color) base, then we will paste the sticker labels on the surface.
But you can also combine single color printing with sticker labels, for example, put a round sticker label on a pink round can lid.

3. Custom Screen Printing On Tins
For small quantity of tin box or tin cans, and you have simple information like your logo or slogan, and the design is single color or maximum 2 colors, you can choose screen printing.

Looking for something brand new?
If the three major printing methods listed above can not meet what you expect, we are open to hear from you, please don’t hesitate to contact for your special tin box customization requirements.