One of the gems hidden within our offices is the Marketing Sample Room. At the end of each year, we try to take a step back and evaluate the ways we could organize our little space. The goal of this exercise is to make small adjustments at the beginning of the year to better streamline it for the future. Today we’re going to walk you through how we organize for the upcoming year!
What Is The Sample Room?
The Sample Room is where we keep a selection of items on hand to physically examine and reference. We stock over 26,0000 products, so having a small representation of these items available to our team in an organized manner is very useful.
Fun Sample Room Facts
Here are a couple of fun facts about the Paper Mart Sample Room.
- There’s More Than One! Each department has their own version of a sample room. Depending on their needs, their sample selection will be stocked and organized with products geared to help keep everyone up to date and informed on the Paper Mart products.
- Our Craft & DIY Mecca! Ever wonder where some of your favorite DIYs are stored? They’re probably here! Throughout the years, we’ve dreamed up a slew of amazing packaging hacks, DIYs, and crafts. We store these creations safely within our sample room for future inspiration.
Organizing The Paper Mart Sample Room
For the Marketing department, one of the biggest issues we found was visibility and accessibility. We found that smaller items like pillow boxes, bows, ribbons and metal tins were getting overlooked and forgotten. To help make these items easier to find, we updated our shelf storage using a few helpful storage and organization tools.
Our Organization Tools
To help upgrade our sample room, we relied heavily on these organizing essentials.
Blank Labels: Labels are great for maintaining a neat and orderly space. We used them to help us clearly identify the location of our loose items.
Corrugated Bin Boxes: Corrugated bin boxes are designed for efficient storage. They feature tall, sturdy walls that help keep loose items contained, and a slight dip along the front so the contents are easy to get to.
Clear-sided Containers: Clear containers are great for quickly and easily identifying items while still maintaining an organized space. We used a few of our clear-sided tubes to store smaller, loose items like ribbon scraps and confetti bows.
Here’s How We Organized Our Sample Room For The New Year
First, We Faced Our Clutter
The easiest way to sort through clutter is to tackle it head on! Working slowly through each shelf, we fully and completely emptied the contents onto our workspace and began to sort through our items.
Second, We Sorted By Color For Visibility
One of our major pain points was visibility. To help fix this, we decided to color coordinate our collection of products by grouping our items by major color families – red, orange, green, etc. Organizing by color family helps make product identification easier and quicker.
Note: When it comes to organization, there are a slew of different methods! From alphabetical order to the Dewey Decimal System, there is no wrong way to organize. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes or re-do your initial plan of action to find what will work best for you and your needs. If you need more storage and organization help, check out our post on 3 Easy DIY Home & Organization Ideas here!
Third, We Stored Our Items For Accessibility
While color-coding our samples helps us see items that we would typically overlook, we needed an easy and efficient way to reach these items while maintaining a neat storage space. For this, we used cardboard bin boxes and clear-sided containers to help keep the smaller items grouped together.
Finally, We Labeled
We finished off our shelf storage transformation by neatly labeling each shelf with blank, white labels.
Do you find yourself getting the organizing bug? Got any tips and tricks that you want to share? Let us know! In the meantime, stay tuned! We’ll be making more super fun and easy DIYs all year long, so keep watching for more craft videos, tips for small businesses, and product features.
Where do you find the bigger boxes for storage?
Hi Sandy! Thanks for asking!! We like to use our RSC Corrugated Boxes (https://www.papermart.com/p/standard-rsc-corrugated-cartons/1001) to help contain smaller items for storage. They come in a wide variety of sizes and their thick, corrugated cardboard walls are ultra-sturdy!