So what does this mean to a designer? It means realistic prototypes help shorten the design cycle, speed approvals and accelerate time-to-market.
Traditionally, consumer product packaging involves five stages before manufacturing: concept generation, product engineering, sampling, testing and brand consistency. The full process generates between 10 and 100 prototypes per development cycle, which can become very costly, very quickly. This is especially true when external vendors are tasked with creating realistic prototypes for each stage of the development process.

On average, each stage requires prototypes
that can cost on average $1500 to cover labor, tooling, painting, hand finishing, machining and color matching. At that rate, one product requiring 35 prototypes during the development cycle could cost almost $21,000. Imagine what the total prototyping cost becomes when several products requiring multiple packaging iterations are developed during each cycle.