Maximizing Shelf Appeal with Molds
Despite mounting pressures to shorten time to market and lower costs, personal care and cosmetic manufacturers are custom molding their packages.
By Leslie LaineIn the personal care and cosmetic markets, time and money for packaging development and production have always been tight, and they are getting even tighter. One reason for this is that packaging designs have shorter shelf lives than ever, in part because consumers are less likely to remain loyal to one product and its packaging. TodayÕs consumers have options and can be lured away from a product by an eye-catching competitor.
Jerry Sapienza is president of Toly Products USA (Edison, NJ), a company that offers custom and stock molding for a variety of cosmetic and personal care items. The firm specializes in cosmetic compacts and packaging for skin care products and fragrance. ÒGenerally a custom item would run in the United States for five to seven years on the shelf,Ó says Sapienza. ÒWe are now seeing cases where we have designed with a customer and they have launched a custom item, and, within 18 months, they are redesigning it already. That puts a lot of pressure on everyone in the development chain, because everyoneÕs costs are loaded into the front of product launches.Ó Shorter shelf lives not only mean less time in which to recoup development and production costs, but also necessitate shorter lead times.
Despite these pressures, packagers must compete with a growing variety of eye-catching designs. To differentiate their products, many manufacturers of personal care and cosmetic items are investing in stylish, custom-molded packaging.
Saving Time and Money
Ask a packaging group what they need the most, and the answer will always be more time and money. Time constraints are part of the business. The packaging team often doesnÕt see a project brief until well after marketing and sales have given the project the green light. And money is always an issue, because the cost of goods has a great deal to do with whether a line turns a profit, particularly in the case of a worldwide launch.
As many time- and budget-strapped packaging engineers have discovered, however, the cost and time requirements for custom molding are not as large as they once assumed. Custom molders are offering cutting-edge prototyping and molding technologies that are able to dramatically shorten lead times and lower costs.
hen EstŽe Lauder recently introduced a new Pleasures sampler vial-and-cap package, Lombardi Design & Manufacturing (LDM; Freeport, NY) dramatically reduced design time with the use of advanced prototyping and mold-making techniques.
After Lauder and LDM met and discussed the project, LDM provided a color computer rendering of the proposed design. LDM also produced an engineered model to help answer crucial questions: were the edges too sharp; did the package fit well in the hand; did the tolerances comply with other components; and how did the product integrate with the rest of the line?
After all of the design questions were answered, LDM performed a computerized structural analysis of the design using mold-flow analysis (MFA) to simulate how the molten plastic would enter and fill the proposed mold. This kind of computer analysis can point out areas where turbulence, shrinkage, and stress could weaken or otherwise affect the performance and aesthetics of the finished component. Additionally, wrap analysis was used to predict cooling times and shrinkage factors. Making these calculations before cutting the molds can ensure that only very minor adjustments will be needed for the final mold.
Advanced computer technologies, in part, enabled LDM to save time and money for Lauder. The experience of the LDM team was another reason. The LDM technical staff members are veterans of injection molding, who know how to read MFA charts and, more importantly, know how to make slight changes in the mold to avoid trouble later. Their input in the design process can save days, perhaps weeks, in the time it takes a mold to be ready for production.
Once the mold design was analyzed and approved, LDM created prototypes out of plastic using a rapid prototyping machine, which has a computer-controlled robot that builds a prototype by laying down extruded layers of plastic. The finished prototype was exactly the same size and shape as the proposed component. It was handled, discussed, even decorated to make sure post-molding operations such as labeling, carton sizing, and assembly would run smoothly.
ould run smoothly. ÒIn the end, all of our preparation and analysis decreased expenses and minimized production time,Ó says Carl Lombardi, president of LDM. Custom molders are also working with manufacturers to offer other creative strategies for reducing the costs for achieving a custom design.
Kate Harrington is marketing manager at Lerman Container Co., a division of Custom Bottle Inc. (Naugatuck, CT). Custom Bottle is a blow-molder of stock and custom plastic bottles for a variety of industries, including personal care; Lerman supplies containers, closures, sprayers, and other components to complete the packages. ÒOver the past year or so,Ó says Harrington, Òit seems there has been an increase in private mold building. More people have an awareness that private molds are an option and are not necessarily as costly as they thought. Building custom molds can be particularly affordable if the mold cost can be amortized into the piece price. For larger runs, that can translate into pennies per bottle.Ó
Lerman works with manufacturers not only to custom mold their designs, but also to help them find ways to reduce the costs of a customization effort. One way that some manufacturers are able to update designs at a lower price is to have only neck rings built, rather than entire molds. Sometimes instead of building a whole mold, just building a new neck ring for a couple thousand dollars can change the look of the whole package,Ó Harrington says. ÒFor example, we had one customer who was packaging a body spray in a stock sprayer round with a crimp-on sprayer neck finish. When they decided to add a body lotion to the line, they bought new neck rings to accommodate a threaded dispensing cap. This created a whole new look for that bottle, yet kept it consistent enough so that the two products could be presented together as part of a line. For a very small investment, they tied their packaging in with their marketing program nicely.Ó
Another cost-saving trend Harrington has noticed is stock European molds being brought over to the United States, where the designs appear new and unusual. ÒWe represent a line from Europe, MH Plastics, which looks unique here but is stock molded over there. Bringing it over here was an immediate marketing success. Obviously, there is some cost in shipping the bottles, but that cost can be much less than building them over here.Ó She notes that companies can save as much as 30 or 40% of molding costs by bringing over stock molds from Europe, depending on the quantity of the order.
MH Plastics (Beccles, Suffolk, UK) has provided European molds through Lerman Containers for several major manufacturers of personal care lines who want to save costs on private molds. Joe Mazzilli is the area sales manager for the United States for MH Plastics. He notes that manufacturers of personal care products are opting for using his companyÕs stock molds because they get a Òcustom look for stock prices.Ó For example, he says, U.S. manufacturers who want metric measurements for bottles can use stock molds imported from Europe, rather than building entirely new molds in the United States.
Another way to get a custom look at a stock price is to choose smaller packaging firms, whose stock offerings are not commonly seen on the market. Patrick Baugh is vice president of marketing at Pearce Plastics (Pasadena, CA), a company that offers stock and custom molding for a variety of industries, including personal care. ÒSmaller packaging vendors like Pearce Plastics offer stock products that arenÕt the mainstream,Ó says Baugh. ÒSo by using these products, manufacturers can come up with the effect of a unique package that stands out on the shelf, without having to develop the tools.Ó For example, he says, Pearce Plastics has worked with a personal care manufacturer to offer hair care products in stock jars. Because the jars are unusual, especially for hair treatment items, the manufacturer was able to achieve a custom effect for the product without the cost of customization.
Another cost-saving strategy, says Baugh, is to focus on items that are blow-molded, such as bottles and some jars, for customization. The cost of a custom mold for blow molding is much lower than the cost of a custom mold for injection molding. Injection-molded closures, for example, are very expensive to custom mold. A manufacturer can use a stock closure with a custom bottle for a more inexpensive way to achieve custom packaging.
Investing in Style
Despite the pressures to lower costs and lead times, manufacturers are investing in more sophisticated packaging than ever before. ÒFor example, a typical shampoo bottle of about five years ago was just a plain bottle with a plain cap, but today it seems that each brand has a custom style with the bottles and closures as part of a single integrated design,Ó says Andy Edlund, vice president of marketing and sales at Marland Mold Inc. (Pittsfield, MA). Marland Mold specializes in high-cavitation molds for the closure and packaging industry. Personal care manufacturers make up a large portion of the companyÕs clients.
One example of the more sophisticated custom molding requirements for personal care items has been an increased use of two-color molding, which is a significantly costlier process than single-color molding, says Edlund. Two-color molding is being increasingly used for such projects as two-color caps, which can now be molded in a single mold rather than molded in two parts that are fitted together later.
tted together later. ÒTraditionally, the only market niche that could afford this type of process was high-end cosmetic closures,Ó Edlund says. ÒNow you are starting to see it in commodity products, such as shampoo.Ó The two-color process requires a special mold and an investment in a molding machine that has two heads to inject the two colors. The process can also be used to mold parts from two different materials.
Techpack America (New York City), a company that produces custom and stock molded-plastic packaging for cosmetic and personal care products, has recently noticed an increasing use of designs that require a soft, rubbery surface texture.
According to Patrick Fraillon, vice president of engineering for Techpack America, a recent launch of a hair treatment bottle required custom molding to accommodate such a rubbery texture.
One way to achieve this surface is by spraying on a material called Òsoft touchÓ as a secondary process after molding; another way that Techpack is accommodating the requests of its clients for this texture is with resins that contain rubber blocks in their molecular structure. These rubbery materials require mold designs that account for their specific properties, as well as special dies for decoration.
Techpack has also seen increasing requests for interlocking personal care packaging designs, which require molding to very tight tolerances. Interlocking designs can be used for travel kits, such as the ones produced by Techpack for GuerlainÕs Issima skin care line. These kits contain several bottles that lock together. Consumers can select from the product array to suit their travel needs. Connected, these products are not lost in a purse or luggage. To meet the increasing demand for interlocking designs, Techpack has just introduced its Trio line of interlocking packages, produced by Decoplast, a sister company.
Accomplishing More with Molds
With the increasing demand for lower costs and faster turnaround times, it is perhaps surprising to see so many personal care and cosmetic manufacturers investing in custom molding for their products.
But as manufacturers have discovered, custom molding today is more time- and cost-efficient than ever before, with the advent of advanced molding technologies, such as computer-aided design and manufacturing, and with cost-saving strategies, such as building new custom necks for molds instead of entire molds.
Also, manufacturers have discovered that accomplishing more during the molding phase can minimize the costs of secondary operations. For example, using two-color molds is a more costly molding process, but much if not all of the cost can be offset by the reduced assembly costs and the time required to snap together two separate pieces in a secondary operation. Harrington has noticed an increased investment in custom molding at Lerman Container Co. as a way to minimize secondary operations and lower total costs and time. Some of our customers, for example, might build a mold so that it will better accommodate a type of label, such as a shrink-band label. They are incorporating molding into their overall planning better now. Now they are more likely to consider a step such as labeling at the same time that they are planning the molding.Ó
And of course, the competition among packaging designs in the personal care and cosmetic markets is more intense than ever before. ManufacturersÕ demand for custom molding will remain high as long as the need to establish shelf appeal continues to be a driving force in the marketplace.