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Contract Packaging: Packing It All In

Tradition

It has always been the filler, if one is used, that completes the job. This is the case especially for a small company without in-house manufacturing facilities.

Angela Word, founder of PaperDoll Cosmetics (Saratoga, CA), says, "I never met a filler who doesn't do contract packaging. They want to do the whole job for you, and it makes sense, since they're the last stop on the production line. It's much easier for me to just have whoever is filling that particular product do the packaging also."

Circle of Friends, a Los Angeles­ based company that markets a personal care line for children, however, faced some challenges when looking for a filler. The company's president, Eleanor Keare, says finding a filler that could also contract package the single-dose packets for the brand's new wash-out hair color was difficult.

"It was hard to find a contract filler who would make this package for us," says Keare. "With the wrong machinery, air bubbles can get trapped in the packets and they end up looking half full."

Keare buys the formula from her filler in bulk, then ships it to her contract supplier, who, as a turnkey service, provides the packets, the printing, and the filling. Keare herself sources all of the line's other components, including plastic bottles, jars, and pumps, and will usually have them sent straight to one of her numerous fillers.

For larger companies like Estée Lauder, outsourcing is often essential. "We do outsource," says Harry Bennett, vice president of technical packaging, The Estée Lauder Companies. "But [we do so] only when we need to meet production demands. However, on occasion, someone will come to us with a unique formulation, and then we will have them do the filling."

Kiss My Face (Gardiner, NY) is one firm that has been in business for 20 years and has never had its own manufacturing facility. The firm's product line is based on unique, "obsessively natural" formulations, says founder Stephen Byckiewicz. Yet they are still able to maintain total control over ingredients, even without an in-house R&D lab.

"I do a lot of extensive research on essential oils, and I know what I want to be in the formula," says Byckiewicz. Kiss My Face has a number of contract manufacturers, each making, filling, and packaging specific products. "There are both advantages and disadvantages to outsourcing. A big plus is not having all of the manufacturing headaches," he says. "We have great, long-term relationships with all of the companies we work with. We may set up our own R&D lab in the future, but for now our system works well."

Supplying More Services

There are many suppliers who are doing more contract packaging and manufacturing these days, and the requests keep coming in. Arkay Packaging (New York City) is one such company. It specializes in cartons, but doesn't mind the extra work--and wants more of it in the future.

"Our goal is to do more complete projects, from concept to the finished product," says Mitchell Kaneff, Arkay's president and CEO. Through contract manufacturing, Arkay added ribbons and embossed foils onto a promotional handbag-shaped box for Clinique, which was on the cover of CPC Packaging's July/August 2003 issue. A team at Arkay bought the ribbons, attached them by hand, put them into groups of 25, and shipped them out.

Ameri-Seal (Chatsworth, CA), which specializes in shrink sleeves, has just added a "contract sleeving" division to the company. After testing the idea on a trial basis more than a year ago, the firm found that customers wanted this added value.

Howard Millstein, president of Ameri-Seal, explains, "Many customers were requesting this service of us. We happen to be in an area with a tremendous number of contract fillers, and we're working closely with them. Some customers were buying sleeves from us, shipping them with the bottles up to Canada to have the sleeves applied, and then back down to our area to have them filled. It's a great advantage to keep all the manufacturing in one area--a lot is saved in freight costs."

In order to apply the sleeves, it takes sophisticated equipment and a steam process--not the usual heat tunnel. One of the benefits of this process is being able to apply the sleeve at a lower temperature--180 degrees instead of 400. Lower temperatures mean that the band shrinks evenly, with no distortion, even with complicated graphics.

DMI (Dimensional Merchandising Inc.; Wharton, NJ) is a major contract manufacturer, filler, and packager of cosmetics and personal care products. With an in-house product development team, they are known for their unique formulas, such as OptiJel, a clear cosmetic base which allows designers to sculpt 3-D visuals onto a cosmetic, such as lip gloss. But they also design and supply components, such as their miniature lipstick package called Mini Lips.

Less Is More—For One Contractor

Clear sticks put a product's color at the center of attention. Also practical, transparent sticks make it easy to identify a product's shade.

Lulu Beauty's Crème Rouge stick is transparent, including its dial-style base. Customers can view the rouge's color, as well as the base's mechanisms working as the product is elevated.

Pro-Motion Industries LLC (Hammonton, NJ)
is one of the few companies that we have found with a single area of expertise—contract labeling. The company doesn't fill, and has no intentions of doing so. Pro-Motion doesn't even manufacture its own labels—it just applies them. Since it's not in direct competition, Pro-Motion get lots of work from fillers and component manufacturers, as well as label suppliers, when a labeling job gets too large in volume or too demanding.

"We're a small part of the contracting world, we just do our little part very well," says Bill Cone, president of Pro-Motion, which is one of the largest contract labeling facilities in the country and a specialist in applying pressure-sensitive labels.

Cone explains that labeling jobs become challenging and line efficiencies go down when production has to stop for label adjustments. If labeling is done first, he says, filling is more efficient.

Applying extremely thin labels, one of the latest trends in labeling, is another challenge. Cone says, "It takes a delicate touch to get a thin label off the web carrier and onto the product without wrinkles or bubbling problems, which becomes more of a challenge as labels get even thinner."

Tubes and aerosol cans are among the most difficult packages to label. While Pro-Motion doesn't do aerosol labeling, the company has one of the largest capacities in the United States for off-line tube labeling, reports Cone. Because of the flexibility of the tube, it must be put onto a fixture and spun. The label is applied during the spin. Now that tubes are becoming more flexible, an even thinner label is needed. "The thinner you go, the higher the difficulty factor goes up."

A few of their clients include Sancoa International (for Revlon) and Cebal Americas, as well as brands like Bath & Body Works and the private-label Fierce scent from Abercrombie & Fitch. P&G has also hired the company to help solve problems on their lines, and many companies call on them to test new materials.

To the Rescue

Contractors take a lot of pressure off beauty product companies. They worry about coordinating incoming deliveries of all components necessary for a project and about having the time to assemble it by the ship date. Craig Lowy, owner of TechniPack (Piscataway, NJ), says that "Everyone else could be late--the carton supplier, label manufacturer, the bottle maker--but the ship date never changes. We have to be on time, even if it means unloading a truck in the middle of the night."

Demand for the new Schick Intuition razor increased so much at launch that TechniPack was finishing up a rush job for the company when we spoke to them. TechniPack designed the complete line of point-of-purchase displays for the launch with its in-house graphic and structural designer. The firm also packaged and sealed the razors in their primary packages.

TechniPack will also let a designer know when a design is too costly to produce. Lowy says his firm redesigned a product once and saved a client one-and-a-half million dollars in materials. Since the new package was lighter, an added surprise was the savings of a half million dollars in postage. Lowy says, "We helped build the brand, because with the savings, the company increased its mailing program to target additional potential customers."

When companies run out of capacity, they often turn to a contractor, like Unette (Wharton, NJ). The firm forms, fills, and seals unit-of-use packages, but it also has a contract side to the business, where clients will send in all components, whether they're bottles, jars, caps, labels, or reclosable squeeze tubes, and Unette puts them all together.

"We have found a demand to supplement a company's need for production when they don't have enough capacity--they can't fill fast enough, or they don't want to break into a line to set up another run. We then become an extension of their manufacturing facility," says Terry Sweeney, director of sales at Unette.

Sweeney tells us that Unette has changed operations recently to accommodate quicker setups and short runs. "Being able to do a fast turnaround definitely gives you an edge," he says. One of Unette's recent jobs was working on Redken's Extreme-Deep Fuel. The product was filled in Unette's unit-of-use tubes and packed into cartons supplied by AGI Klearfold.

Sample Sizes

The companies that specialize in sample-sized packages--including blister cards, unit doses, and vials--are all a large part of the contract world. It takes their specialized machinery to be able to fill these miniature forms of packaging, so they often handle the entire job, from designing packaging to filling.

Howard Thau, president of Sonic Packaging Industries Inc. (Westwood, NJ), says, "The biggest trend we're seeing today in the cosmetic and cosmeceutical areas [is the use of] applicator packages, and we are fortunate to have numerous options available in the latest applicator technologies." The applicator packages include single-use packages that are designed with applicators that are either presaturated with product or that can be saturated at the point of use.

The types of applicator packages popular now include towelettes, pads, and swab sticks. A number of different brands are getting ready to launch new products in these forms. Some of the more-aggressive products need to be kept separate from their applicators until use, and Sonic also makes packaging to accommodate these types.

Klocke of America Inc. (Ft. Myers, FL) has specialized in contract filling liquid unit-dose blisters, sachets, and specially molded products since 1998 in the U.S. and for more than 30 years in Europe.

"We have provided a full turnkey service since the beginning, which our customers have come to rely on and expect," says Don Hopta, vice president of sales and marketing for Klocke of America.

For Avon's new mark. line, Klocke recently produced two types of fragrance samplers and samplers for liquid foundation, lipstick, and the brand's Hook Up lip gloss. Klocke was asked to deliver the complete packages, ready for distribution, including registered foil printing, filling, carding, bagging, and packout--on time and on a budget. Hopta adds, "We take as much pride in the finished product as our customers do."

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