Sold in spring, stored in a shed.

This category sells in a window. Lawn treatments, seed and plant food move in a handful of weeks when the weather turns, and a reprint in the middle of that is no use to anybody. So the run is forecast, printed once, and expected to be right first time. Getting the colour standard agreed before the season rather than during it is the whole difference between a calm spring and an expensive one.

The contents are heavy and awkward. Five kilos of lawn feed in a folding carton puts load on a glue line that a cereal box never sees, and the case it ships in gets stacked on a pallet, moved by forklift and often stored under a canopy rather than indoors. Board grade, grain direction and how the carton is glued decide whether that arrives looking like new stock or like clearance.

Then the pack goes somewhere damp. A garage or a shed swings between cold and warm, and an uncoated board that looked handsome in a garden centre can soften over a winter. Substrate, coating and adhesive get chosen for where the product ends up rather than for the day it leaves here.

The look of the category is its own discipline. Home and garden leans hard on illustration and flat colour, which is the least forgiving thing to print: there is no photograph for the eye to forgive a shift against, so a green that drifts between the lawn feed and the lawn seed is obvious on the shelf. That, and the regulated part of the panel, are why the colour is measured rather than judged.