Personal Care Feature: Taking Stock
Photo courtesy of INCA America Ltd. Speed, flexibility, and cost are just a few reasons companies rely on stock components.
By Sally Lane Using stock components to bottle cosmetics and personal care products is cost-effective, fast, and doesn't require a lot of design expertise. It's a mistake, however, to believe that stock components are just a low-end packaging solution for companies with a tight budget. Keeping up with the rapidly changing tastes of today's consumer represents a serious challenge for players both large and small, and stock components enable companies to get new products to market rapidly while watching the bottom line.
Staying Ahead of the Pack
Cosmetics companies have been relying more and more on stock packaging to keep up with increasingly savvy—and fickle—customers, says Chris Thorpe of HCT Packaging (Bedminster, NJ). According to Thorpe, more money has been spent, for example, on targeting younger girls in recent years. "These girls become 17-year-olds who are much more packaging-aware than their parents were at the same age."
Targeting this demographic has meant a proliferation of short-term promotions and products with short life cycles. "Consumers want the latest thing," says Thorpe. "Companies want to control their brand images, but there isn't always time to custom design every [package] for launch."
Creating packages with stock components helps companies speed up their product launches. So glass bottle suppliers like Arrowpak, a division of Baralan International SPA (Richmond Hill, NY), warehouse enough components to ensure quick delivery. "We maintain a 70,000-sq-ft warehouse in New York, and a 30,000-sq-ft facility in Los Angeles," explains Arrowpak CEO Gino Nahum. "When companies call us in the morning requesting bottles, they sometimes get them that afternoon."
For Arrowpak, maintaining large inventories of stock components is relatively safe because the needs of the supplier's regular customers are fairly predictable. But when new products are being launched and the look of the packaging hasn't yet been established, companies are often interested in mixing and matching colors and other attributes. As a result, stock packaging suppliers must do more than mold containers on a per-order basis. They must get the job done quickly.
Companies with a need for such speedy service from their suppliers can benefit from made-to-order stock containers, which are faster and easier to develop than custom-designed ones. "With stock packaging, the contract manufacturer already owns the preexisting mold, so you get to skip the often lengthy and costly project development process," says Clare Donnor of INCA (New York City). This can help rush a company's product to market, Donnor says, whereas the "blueprint making, pilot mold creation, first-sample approval, and mold construction [on custom jobs] can take two to six months."
Speed to market was definitely an issue for Hawaiian Tropic (Daytona Beach, FL) when it recently collaborated with Mattel on the Barbie Sun Block Stick. "Several of our packages utilize stock components," says Lori Davis, assistant product manager for Hawaiian Tropic. "Because they are already created, we save valuable time in the design stage."
Streamlined Design
"The speed with which you can get something from concept to store shelves is becoming increasingly important," says Walt Dwyer of Cosmopak Corp. (New York City). "But the ability to offer a diverse range of distinctive products to today's more savvy customer is also essential."
Indeed, companies that invest great resources in building brand names are reluctant to put their logos on bottles that don't reflect their unique identity. With modern stock molding techniques, however, saving time doesn't have to mean sacrificing great looks.
"We're seeing a big shift toward the larger companies using more stock components," Dwyer says. "This is because of the availability of a wider array of stock components and the ability to modify stock components so that they almost look like they were made from a custom mold."
Mike Warford of Colt's Plastics Company, Inc. (Dayville, CT), says modifying existing packaging doesn't require "much more time or effort. We can do things like emboss your logo in the cap, deboss it, or split a jar down the middle with a divider so it can contain two products. We can even change the capacity of the jar."
Companies can take comfort in knowing that, for most packaging suppliers like Colt's, the modifications Warford speaks of have been built into their project turnaround time. In other words, the time it takes to produce a bottle with an embossed logo is still only two to three months—the same amount of time it would take to produce a similar bottle without the logo. Typical modifications include hot-stamp foils, gold and silver vacuum-metallized finishes, matte finishes, screened imaging, and of course, various colors.
Dominique glass and plastic bottles and the Laurie jar are among the stock packages supplied by DieterBakicEnterprises. Some companies source stock components and discover that simple, understated decoration is enough to make their products stand out on the retail shelf. For example, "The people at Prai (New Canaan, CT) chose a very simple stock bottle for a group of their specialty antiaging products," says Jenifer Brady of packaging supplier Brad-Pak Enterprises (Garwood, NJ). "Prai really made the packaging look elegant by frosting the glass to give it a soft, silky feel. Then they added a two-color decoration, one of the colors being gold, which gave it a nice, rich look," Brady says.
Of course, no number of special decorations can hide a bottle design that's outdated or just plain unattractive. That's why coming up with new designs is an important part of any stock packaging supplier's business. Cosmetics companies expect it. An experienced designer himself, HCT's Thorpe employs a design team based in London. Its primary purpose is to keep an eye out for new trends. HCT then brings this expertise to its customers—a service useful to companies, particularly start-ups, that don't have the time or money to keep tabs on the current trends themselves.
Why Start-Ups Stock Up
When Melina Macall launched Muti Oils LLC (Montclair, NJ), a high-end aromatherapy company, she knew exactly what she wanted packaging-wise. "My products are very pure, so I wanted the packaging to reflect that," Macall says. "I use quality ingredients, so I wanted the packaging to look high-end. I also wanted to be environmentally conscious and avoid using too much [secondary packaging]." Simple is a good word to describe her overall approach, she says.
But Macall found that bringing her vision to the retail shelf without the financial resources of a more established company was quite a challenge. Having custom bottles designed and built from scratch was out of the question, so she began researching stock bottles instead.
"I obtained dozens of sample bottles in different colors, shapes, and sizes, and played around with various labels," says Macall. "I also talked to different suppliers about minimum order sizes. I didn't want to have to buy 50,000 bottles at the outset. I wanted to get more like 100 because I needed the option to test one bottle for six months and then change my mind."
By researching different stock packaging solutions first, Macall kept her options open and maintained a great deal of control over the look of her product line. "I buy my plastic bottles from one company, and the lids from another," she says. "I go to a third company for glass jars, a fourth for sample-sized containers and, of course, a printer does all the labeling." She even discovered that doing research on the Web could save her money. "A lot of packaging suppliers give you lower minimum orders on their Web sites," she explains. "You can get better deals that way."
Macall's experience is not uncommon, according to Warford. "Stock packaging requires very small minimum orders, which is important because there are so many start-ups in the cosmetics industry these days," Warford says. "Sometimes smaller firms just don't have the capital to tool new molds."
Brady adds that start-ups are unsure of how their products will fare in the market. "With stock packaging," Brady says, "a company can pick up the phone and have more units within days if one of their products gets a tremendous response from consumers."
Another way small companies can soften the blow of minimum-order requirements is by switching out components. "We recently developed a slim-line aluminum makeup compact with interchangeable pan wells," says Inca's Donner. "You can use different pan configurations, or even develop your own plastic molds for pans. Clients can order one compact and change the pan configuration to hold different products, eliminating the need to order two separate compacts."
Indeed, companies' needs for fast turnaround times and low minimum orders challenge suppliers. To compete, suppliers are seeking out business aggressively and providing new solutions all the time. "We're designing new packaging all year long," says HCT's Thorpe. "Every week we introduce innovative items. This industry is a competitive business, and we need to be offering companies the latest thing."
Another company that understands this challenge is 3C Inc. (Hawthorne, NJ), owner of a large assortment of stock molds, including lipstick cases, bottles, and compacts. The firm offers stock molds not only as individual items, but also as complete presentations for start-ups, explains 3C president Lou Della Pesca. "We create a custom look for the average new company that can't afford the high cost of building many custom molds," he says. For example, 3C recently developed a range of stock packages that can give start-ups much-desired options. The line includes jars and bottles of different sizes that can be paired with interchangeable caps in various styles. With such options, he says, "Anyone can create a custom look [using] stock components."
Going Forward
Ask anyone in the packaging industry and they'll likely tell you that the main advantage of using stock components is speed. For small companies, speed equals affordability. For large brands, speed means minimizing risk while adapting to rapidly changing market conditions. For consumers of beauty products, stock packaging means a more exciting shopping experience with more creatively packaged products to choose from.
"The main reason stock packaging is doing so well is because product development time is getting shorter and shorter," says Dieter Bakic of DieterBakicDesign and DieterBakicEnterprises (Munich). Investing two years in development of a new product line is unrealistic. By the time it's ready, the industry has completely changed.
Indeed, as the cosmetics and personal care marketplace gets more and more crowded, stock components are likely to play an increasing role in shaping the look of things to come.