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Metal Containers: Modernizing Metal

New Shapes, New Value

One package that can raise a product’s marketing value is CCL Container’s full-shaped aerosol cans. CCL now offers the ability to custom shape its aerosol cans to within 20-mm of the bottom of the container.

“Beauty brands like packages with design equity,” says Martin. “In the past, brands could only create unique bottle shapes in glass and plastic. Aluminum was left out of the design party, until now.” Men’s grooming brand Gentleman’s Youth Movement, or GYM, was the first to take advantage of CCL’s full-body shaping technology.

Martin says that because aerosol containers can now be produced in value-added shapes, more beauty companies are considering them for their products. Hairspray is one such product. “There have been some issues with regard to volatile organic compounds (VOCs) for hairsprays that are driving these products to aluminum containers and away from tin-plated steel,” he says. “Once they decide to switch to aluminum, we then say to them, ‘Since we’re going to aluminum, let’s try to do something from a design perspective as well.’” Other categories, such as continuous-spray sunscreens, have already made the leap to aerosol packaging. Martin says that aerosols are now also being embraced by the depilatory market.

Demand for uniquely shaped aluminum containers was what led supplier Brad-Pak Enterprises (Garwood, NJ) to start distributing a 50-ml straight-sided aluminum bottle.

“Most Monobloc aluminum bottles are a traditional bullet shape with rounded shoulders,” says Jenifer Brady, vice president of sales and marketing for Brad-Pak. The new straight-sided cylindrical aluminum bottle resembles a cigar tube with a pump attached.

Bottles Surrounded by Luxury

When it comes to bottles and metals, another recent trend has been to use a metal sleeve to decorate the outside of a bottle, says Frank Beinborn, marketing manager for metal packaging supplier Seidel GmbH + Co. (Marburg, Germany).

“We think that in 2007, a lot of new fragrance launches will have metal sleeves,” Beinborn says. He adds that the spherical aluminum shell that Seidel manufactured for the Boss in Motion by Hugo Boss fragrance bottle may have played a part in setting this trend.

One of the latest fragrance bottles to feature a metal casing is the rectangular glass fragrance bottle for Donna Karan Gold. Launched last year, the fragrance’s bottle is encased in an anodized aluminum sleeve. The company made sure that all of the package’s components could be separated, sorted, and recycled.

Instead of using glue or double-faced tape to adhere the sleeve to the glass bottle, the company molded the aluminum sleeve with feet at the bottom. These feet are tough enough to hold the bottle in the sleeve but are also flexible, allowing consumers to remove the sleeve from the bottle.

Fragrance bottles aren’t the only bottles being decorated with metal sleeves. Luxury skin care brand RéVive adorned its skin care bottles with anodized aluminum sleeves. The custom-colored shiny silver sleeves were a good way to dress up the plastic airless bottles.

SeaCliff Packaging Inc. (Newport Beach, CA) supplied all of the components. Vonda Simon, president of SeaCliff, says that a sleeve was a better choice to create the high-end metal look that RéVive sought. Other options were metallizing, electroplating, or spraying on a metal finish. “The other options do not give the package as much of a high-end look or feel,” she says. While those techniques are often used to add metallic looks, in this case, Simon says, “They didn’t create the weight, look, or feel of a higher-end package.”

High-End Caps

Marketers are also looking for high-end, innovative designs in metal closures. “We see a trend for more-complex and exceptional designs for caps, closures, and collars,” says Beinborn.

Last year, Seidel created caps for Avon’s Derek Jeter Driven fragrance and Puma’s Create fragrances. The rectangular Derek Jeter cap was made from deep-drawn aluminum. The cap’s shiny silver surface was laser engraved with the fragrance name and fitted with a light-blue transluscent plastic plate on top.

Unlike the Derek Jeter cap, which features smooth surfaces, Puma’s Create caps were fashioned with ridges to mimic the look of a cap on an artist’s oil-paint tube. The ridges made deep-draw forming the aluminum cap a challenge. “One difficulty was to shape the grooves,” says Beinborn. “Another challenge was the cap’s tapering structure. It is always very difficult to form aluminum in a tapering shape because the material needs to be compressed.”

Anthony DiMaio, director of operations for metal cap supplier Cameo Metal Products Inc. (Brooklyn, NY), says that he’s noticed a trend for weighting caps. “Adding weight is a big thing now—even for mascara and lip gloss packages and jar lids,” he says. “Customers assume that a package is more luxurious when it’s heavier.”

DiMaio says that Cameo offers two options for weighting caps. One is to use an aluminum shell with a sintered metal weight inside of it. The other is to die-cast—by melting and molding metal—a cap entirely out of Zamac, which Cameo started doing itself last year. “Price-wise, companies can decide whether it makes sense to do a Zamac part,” says DiMaio.

Zamac in Demand

Supplier HCT Packaging (Bridgewater, NJ) is taking a serious look at Zamac. The company says that demand for unique Zamac packages is growing.

The Zamac pieces that HCT usually creates are novelty items, which are often marketed as limited-edition products by brands. These packages include Urban Decay’s dog-tag-style Commando compact (covered in CPC Packaging’s January/February 2007 issue) and a Zamac lip gloss ring created for ModelCo.

HCT says that initial tooling costs for Zamac are often lower than that of injection molding. Rebecca Goswell, creative director for HCT Packaging, adds, “The production rates and tooling costs for Zamac are far less restricting than those for plastic. This makes it perfect for smaller, niche companies that have the creativity to bring Zamac innovations quickly to market in smaller numbers to test the waters, but that can’t necessarily afford to tool up for custom components in plastic.”

Goswell adds, “Over the past 18 months, we have been approached by many of our key customers to work on special-edition and promotional items in metal.” In fact, HCT recently opened an HCT Metals factory in China, which is meant to complement the supplier’s normal plastics packaging business. The metal factory focuses on three types of products: metal fragrance caps, metal compacts, and metal jewelry-style components.

Metal Finishing

If brands are looking to give nonmetal packages a metal finish, they often turn to electroplating or metallizing. Plastic injection molder Lombardi Design & Manufacturing (Freeport, NY) is often asked to use these methods to make plastic components look like metal.

Victor Caracappa, sales manager for Lombardi, says that electroplating and metallizing create very different effects. When metallizing a plastic component, Caracappa says that a very thin aluminum layer is deposited on the plastic. Lacquer must be applied over the aluminum layer because the aluminum layer is not very thick or resistant. By contrast, during electroplating, heavy metal is deposited on a component, creating a very resistant metal surface that requires no lacquering and that feels like metal.

When it comes to creating a gold look, metallizing can be more cost-efficient than electroplat- ing. “If you were going to electroplate something gold, the cost is very high because you actually have to use real gold,” says Caracappa. Lombardi recently metallized a gold compact for The Estée Lauder Companies.

Caracappa says the challenge with Estée Lauder’s compact was working with its fluted surface. “With a fluted surface, the challenge is in getting the lacquering uniform because when you spray the lacquer on, the lacquer tends to want to build up in the crevices of the fluting. And if you have lacquer buildup, the color is going to vary because the color is in the lacquer, not in the metal that’s under the lacquer.”

Colorful Finishes

One benefit of metallizing is that it can be used to create colorful metallic finishes. The color is incorporated in the lacquer that is applied over the aluminum layer.

Colorful metallized finishes are a growing trend, says anodizing specialist Anomatic Corp. (Newark, OH). “We produced more than 1000 unique color and finish combinations last year,” says Anomatic’s Scott Rusch. “These custom-formulated colors range from tangerine and strawberry to an antique copper look.”

Rusch adds that Anomatic is skilled at keeping color consistent throughout the anodizing process—something that other suppliers may find difficult. The supplier used anodizing to create colorful, protective finishes on Clinique’s bamboo-style lipstick containers.

In June of last year, metal supplier Axilone USA (New York City) opened a new metal production plant in China with full anodizing and automatic polishing lines, as well as eyelet machines for creating unique shapes. (Axilone’s U.S. plant will also add more of this equipment.) The new China facility will offer new techniques for achieving colorful metal finishes.

As for CCL Container, Ed Martin says, “We see a lot of people wanting to look at metallic base coats in different colors, such as metallic red, metallic orange, or metallic green.”

Metal Look for Tubes

Metal looks are also becoming more popular for squeezable plastic tubes. One supplier uses printing to achieve metallic looks, while another uses labels.

Supplier Alcan Packaging Beauty (New York City) introduced its new brushed-aluminum plastic tube. The metallic effect is achieved by printing three to four layers of silk-screened inks onto a plastic tube.

Tectubes (Pitman, NJ) recently worked with CCL Label (Robbinsville, NJ) to create a metallic-looking tube for hair care brand TIGI. The extruded plastic oval tube was covered with a metallized polyethylene film label that looks like metal. The tube’s plastic closure was metallized by Spectracoat (Watertown, CT).

The label extends from the tube’s crimp zone all the way down into the head of the tube. “It gives the package a no-label look because you do not see where the label material begins and ends,” says Christi Brown, national account manager for CCL Label.

“When you look at the tube, it appears to be entirely metal—the tube, the closure, everything. You don’t see any plastic at all,” says Deborah Spaeth, account manager for Tectubes.

Tin Packaging: Combining Vintage Looks with Modern Technology

Beauty brands are often drawn to the old-fashioned appeal of tins. Brands sometimes use tins to create a sense of nostalgia with their customers. For instance, Johnson & Johnson had supplier J. L. Clark (Rockford, IL) recreate a vintage metal Band-Aid tin to celebrate its anniversary, instead of just selling the Band-Aids in paper cartons. J. L. Clark says that these tins sold out.

“Metal is more durable and substantial than paper, cardboard, and even some forms of plastic,” says Christine White, sales administration manager for J. L. Clark. “For this reason, people tend to reuse tins to keep other items in them. For instance, I switched out all of my Band-Aids from cartons to the metal tin.”

Paris-based beauty brand Bourjois often chooses tins to house its makeup gift sets. Recently, the brand had metal tins created for its 2006 holiday eye shadow kits. Demand for the tins was so high that an additional run had to be ordered.

Each eye shadow kit is housed in a round, brushed-gold tin. The products are kept in place by a vacuum-formed plastic insert. Design firm Dragon Rouge (New York City) had illustrator Bruce Seret create circus-themed graphics, which were printed on the tins’ lids. China-based firm Baruch was the packaging supplier.

Of the tins, Nancy Tarantola, Bourjois’s marketing director, says, “They are reminiscent of our history and our origin in the theater. The vintage-inspired packaging speaks directly to our consumer.”

Marketers may want the vintage look of tin, but they don’t want tin technology to be outdated. Suppliers are making modern improvements to tin and even combining metal and plastic. For instance, J. L. Clark offers a plastic hinge that makes tin containers easier to lock and unlock, and that provides a more-secure close.

“It improves the durability of the container and is great for repeated handling,” says White. “It’s a great example of having the consumer impact of metal but the efficiencies and economies of plastic.”

Elizabeth Arden chose the plastic hinge for a tin for its bronzing powder. White says, “The tight fit provided by the plastic closure keeps powder from escaping from the tin.”

As another advancement, J. L. Clark now uses digital technology during the prepress stage to make the process more efficient. “We have computer-to-plate technology in- house, and we make plates in-house,” says White. “Not everybody has that capability.”

Adapting RFID to Metal

Crown Holdings Inc. (Philadelphia) and UK-based security-technology firm QinetiQ have adapted QinetiQ’s Omni-ID Pak RFID technology so that it can be used on metal packaging. “With this development, metal has gone from being RFID unfriendly to having powerful benefits that competitive packaging formats do not,” said Dan Abramowicz, president of Crown Packaging Technology.

Less than 1-mm thick, the technology allows an ultrahigh-frequency tag to be mounted directly onto a metal substrate. It has been designed to mitigate such issues as signal reflection, detuning, and grounding, which typically reduce or negate RFID’s effectiveness on metal packaging or aqueous-based products.

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