Packaging the Impossible: Featured by Harvard Innovation Labs

Qixuan Li (HKS ’25) was inspired by a bowl of soup to found Dylign — a startup focused on building scalable, founder-friendly packaging solutions for emerging brands.

One winter evening in 2024, Qixuan Li (HKS ’25) was making his signature homemade chicken soup for his friends. As always, his guests gushed over their bowls, but that evening, they encouraged him to go one step further and start his own soup company.

Li had long been interested in starting a CPG brand. Following his friends’ advice, he began researching everything from commercial kitchens to go-to-market strategies. While most of the work seemed possible, one area of starting this business gave him pause: packaging.

Suppliers asked Li for minimum orders of thousands of units and wanted to charge multiple dollars per pouch of soup that could be sold on a store shelf. The upfront cost for packaging was simply too high. As Li talked with other founders, he kept hearing the same frustrations around insurmountable packaging costs.

Instead of giving up his dream of starting a company, Li’s research into packaging led him to shift his entrepreneurial focus. He explained, “Small and midsize brands are a major driver of CPG growth and innovation, with research suggesting they have contributed roughly 45 percent of category growth in recent years. Yet high minimum order quantities effectively turn testing into a gamble, shrinking the room for iteration and slowing the pace of new product innovation.”

This research led Li to found packaging startup Dylign last fall. Six months after its launch, Qixuan sat down with the Harvard Innovation Labs to discuss how the company has evolved and where it’s headed next.

Validating a Big Problem for Small Brands

Qixuan knew that small brands were having trouble accessing affordable packaging through anecdotal conversations with other founders, but it wasn’t until he talked to more than 400 factories that he truly understood the scope of the problem. Qixuan explained, “Whether the factory was in the U.S., Mexico, Turkey, or China, startups had to meet minimum orders of 10,000 units or more, when they only needed a few hundred to test their markets.”

The structural misalignment around packaging for startups and small businesses ran incredibly deep, says Li. "From the factory side, the world is about capacity, efficiency, and standardization. From the founder’s or small business owner's side, it’s about cash flow, uncertainty, and survival." These misaligned incentives between suppliers and startups result in smaller companies overordering packaging and overproducing initial runs of their product, which poses a significant risk to the business’s financial health.

Once Li felt he sufficiently understood the true pain points that both founders and packaging suppliers faced, he began building a company that would offer a better alternative.

Weighing Entrepreneurship Against a Full-Time Paycheck

Around the same time Qixuan was starting Dylign, he was offered a lucrative leadership role at a late-stage company. Qixuan knew that taking the job would have a more certain financial outcome than starting a business, but he said his desire to found a company that could help small brands grow was far greater than his interest in financial security. He ultimately decided to stay the course with his startup.

A few months after starting Dylign, Qixuan shared that the company he had declined to join had been acquired. Looking at the equity he had been offered just a few months earlier, he realized he had walked away from a meaningful payout. That same day, Qixuan received Dylign’s first order of $650.

In reflecting on that moment, Qixuan said, "That $650 check felt bigger than the payout I gave up, because it was the first time Dylign was real. Someone trusted us, paid us, and proved we were solving a problem worth building for."

Evolving From Packaging Vendor to Partner

In August 2025, Li officially founded his packaging company, Dylign. When deciding on the name, he was inspired by the "dieline,” a packaging design template that shows where a package will be cut and folded.

Initially, Dylign focused on helping startups access high quality, more sustainable packaging with low minimum order quantities and lower cost. But as Qixuan worked with Dylign’s first customers, it became clear that his customers needed more than high-quality materials and low minimums. They needed a partner that could reduce the time and complexity around placing orders.

In explaining the larger opportunity for his business, Qixuan said, “When one packaging project took more than 200 back-and-forth emails to finalize and ate more than 100 precious founder hours, I realized how much founder time was being drained by a broken, manual process. This gave me the idea to evolve Dylign from a packaging vendor into a fractional packaging manager.”

Qixuan addressed common bottlenecks to save founders and factories significant time. For example, he built AI algorithms for factories and the Dylign website that cut quoting for complex packaging projects from 48 hours to a single click, and the system has already been adopted by multiple factories. He also ensured brand colors stayed consistent across different materials and finishes, and helped brands execute multiple packaging components — such as jars, pumps, boxes, and mailers — through one streamlined process.

As Qixuan added more services with the aim of streamlining design and ordering, one founder shared with him that having Dylign as their packaging partner was “solving a real last-mile packaging fulfillment problem for the company.”

Accessing Harvard’s Innovation Community

Six months since launch, Qixuan reflected on the significant impact the Harvard Innovation Labs has had on the company’s trajectory, citing everything from the helpful advice he received from Senior B2B Advisor Phil Green to how much he enjoys working out of the i-lab. “I come to the i-lab every day,” he said. “There has been no organization in my life that has been more supportive of my dream than the i-lab.”

Additionally, Qixuan expressed appreciation for the Harvard Innovation Labs being one of Dylign’s early customers, ordering custom-printed giftbags.

Dan Pinnolis, associate director of communications and design at the Harvard Innovation Labs, said, “Custom printing for a small packaging order is typically either really expensive or low quality. Dylign has figured out a way to do high-quality custom printing at fair prices for small order quantities. I really enjoyed working with them!”

Building the AI-Powered Future of Packaging

Looking ahead to the company’s one-year mark, Qixuan has plans to surpass 100 customers and launch a new AI-driven solution to bring efficiency to the ordering process. Qixuan explained, “Rather than spend weeks on quotes and approvals, founders will be able to enter specs and receive real-time recommendations, timelines, and cost projections. If we see exponential growth in the companies using our platform, and we’re helping more startups succeed, that would be real value."