arka.com

Beautiful holiday boxes

I've worked with Arka the last few years to prepare an illustrated holiday box for a local bakery. They are really good at communicating throughout the proof process, and the boxes are always beautifully printed and sturdy.

Date of experience: Nov 07, 2024

Good quality but user experience needs improvement

The quality of the boxes is great, but: - production times are long, though I haven't found another supplier who is faster- there is little transparency on the status of shipping and delivery. I have to proactively go into my account to see the status, and the tracking number is the unmarked number above the "reorder" button- Automated emails with status changes in production, shipping, delivery would be helpful- customer service is hard to reach by phone and email responses are typically a bit slow

Date of experience: Oct 03, 2024

The service was excellent

The service was excellent, accidentally misspelled my email and they figured it out. I ordered some boxes and they were just what we were expecting and asked for!!

Date of experience: Sep 26, 2024

I Like Them

I really liked the boxes and were sturdy and straightforward to put together. Customer service is good and they respond quickly if you keep contacting them. Overall I am pleased with them.

Date of experience: Aug 22, 2022

The best customer service I’ve ever had

Such awesome customer service. Fast delivery. The mailer boxes we ordered were a hit (among some pretty important institutional investors). Can’t recommend them enough! 10/10

Date of experience: Aug 08, 2022

My manager asked for branded boxes for…

My manager asked for branded boxes for an upcoming product launch in 4 weeks. I spoke with a number of manufacturers and none were able to meet our ambitious timeline. Arka came through, made me look great, and the launch was a success!

Date of experience: Oct 14, 2021

I use arka packaging for unbranded…

I use arka packaging for unbranded stock boxes. They are one of the cheapest eco-friendly sources that I was able to find.

Date of experience: May 17, 2021

Ongoing Nightmare

Tldr: Do not use this company. They wasted 8 weeks of our time and money, lost our order, refused to take ownership, blamed everyone but themselves and used our phone number from our order [without our permission] to contact us about another customer’s lost order that was sent to us instead of the correct destination. 2 stars because we received a refund and the samples were nice, but overall the experience was a nightmare and a huge waste of time and money. ------------Where to even start with the full story. I guess I will start with a positive because there is only one. The samples we ordered from Arka turned out beautiful. Mainly because of the design we created, but the print quality was also good so we will give them that. One important thing to note [something we didn’t find out until our boxes were lost] is that Arka is just a nice website interface - they outsource everything. Despite taking 7 weeks to receive our 10 sample boxes & not receiving a tracking email until 3 days after our samples arrived (I will also mention that the “tracking” email did not include an actual tracking number or link - we should have taken that as a sign), we decided to move forward with placing our full order.We placed our full order on January 4, 2021. On January 25th we received an email saying my order was preparing to ship & some questions to answer to coordinate delivery. We responded immediately & followed up a few days later asking for a tracking number at which time Arka responded saying providing a delivery date was not possible and once they had tracking information available they would provide it to us.On February 7th (10 business days after being originally contacted about our order being prepared to ship) we followed up again with Arka because they had still not provided a tracking number. Finally, after having to loop in the owner to our email, we received a tracking number on February 11. The tracking number stated our estimated delivery date was February 11 - the same day we received “tracking” but the link Arka provided had NO tracking history. So, we had no idea where our order actually was.We noticed a freight logo on my tracking so we reached out to that company directly. That company told us they handed over the shipment to another company so we called that company only to find out that due to a logistical error, our shipment had been placed on hold & had been sitting for TEN days. Something we could have looked into sooner if Arka had provided a tracking number, but instead we lost another 10 days.We contacted Arka again at which time they told us it was a weather/COVID delay, which we knew was a lie since we had email proof stating the logistical error from their vendor causing the shipment to be cancelled and ultimately put on hold.A million calls and emails later [with no help from Arka], we were finally able to release the hold on February 15 & received a new ETA of February 24-26 (TWENTY BUSINESS DAYS after our order allegedly shipped) . On February 22, after our tracking hadn’t updated in TWENTY days and no one had contacted us to coordinate delivery we recontacted the freight company who told us our order was lost (after spending HOURS on the phone).We wasted EIGHT WEEKS, thousands of dollars on boxes, thousands of dollars on the delay of our launch of our business and thousands of dollars in rent/ingredients for our kitchen space because we were fooled by a pretty website interface and chose to work with Arka.The crazy part is this story doesn’t even end with OUR lost boxes. On March 10th we received hundreds of someone else’s boxes. Not wanting someone else to go through what we did, we personally reached out to the other company to tell them that we received their boxes. After them not hearing back from Arka, we personally contacted the printing facility Arka uses and coordinated a pick up for redelivery.THEN at 5:30pm on a Friday after we didn’t respond to an email from Arka because we had already scheduled a pick up for their other customer, we got a text from Arka’s owner blaming FedEx for the lost boxes. Not only do we find it completely inappropriate for him to use our phone number from our order to contact us without our permission, he still didn’t accept responsibility for the lost order - he blamed FedEx. FedEx didn’t lose the order, Arka did! The other company’s order was delivered to exactly who it was addressed to… US.In full transparency, the owner contacted us again on March 18th (2.5 months after we placed our order & a month plus after losing our order) offering 50 free boxes and blog post to make it up to us. We declined his offer because it was too late to try and “make it up to us” as we had already encountered too many losses because of Arka. We also did not feel comfortable with Arka promoting our business when we do not support theirs.

Date of experience: Mar 19, 2021

Great service

Date of experience: Jan 27, 2021

Love a company with character

I love a company with character! I had a lot of issues with them during the holidays/ covid and was VERY upset, but I got a personal call from the founder of ARKA recently to talk things out and see what they could do to make things better and that really meant a lot. Communication is so important and to see a company who's owner is taking bad reviews or negative feedback to heart and trying to make it better is a huge WOW.It shows that they are a company that really cares. Also the quality of their boxes are BEAUTIFUL!!

Date of experience: Jan 27, 2021