The Shocking Truth Behind Approval Delays in Packaging Projects

If you’ve ever worked on packaging, you already know this:
approval delays don’t start big — they start quietly.

A missing comment here.
A forgotten version there.
A compliance note that arrives three days too late.
A manager who approves the wrong file because there were five “final” versions.

But here’s the part nobody talks about:

Most approval delays aren’t caused by people.
They’re caused by a system flaw that’s so common, teams don’t even see it anymore.

I’ve watched packaging projects with perfect designs, perfect teams, perfect briefs… still stall for weeks simply because one invisible step went wrong. And almost every brand I talk to struggles with the exact same issue — whether they realize it or not.

Some teams lose 20 hours a week to this single bottleneck.
Others miss launch dates because of it.
A few don’t discover it until the print run goes wrong.

The real shock?

You can predict approval delays before they happen — if you know where to look.

And once you understand the pattern, the entire workflow makes a lot more sense.

Want the deeper breakdown — and the part that truly surprised me?
I’ll be covering it in the next article.