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Sample Packaging: A Diverse Environment for Samples

Commercial air travelers are all too familiar with another growth area—the lengthening list of frustrating security regulations. Now the effects of recent rules regarding liquids have caught the attention of the personal care products industry. Simply put, unit-dose sizes make air travel a bit easier. As Eric Ludwig, president of Telmark Packaging (Hazlet, NJ), points out, “It’s much easier to bring unit-dose packages onto an airplane.” John Hark, president of Unette (Wharton, NJ), notes that, aside from their other benefits, unit-dose samples meet the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s requirement that all liquids, gels, and aerosols weigh 3 oz or less.

Ludwig and others say that kits are also drawing a lot of interest at the moment. “One of the trends that we didn’t see 10 or 15 years ago is customers doing more with samples in kits,” he notes. Traditionally, he says, cosmetics firms would sample, say, skin care and skin cream from a product line of five or six products, focus on one or two, and neglect the others. The new kits could be a giveaway or an expensive travel kit, Ludwig notes.

So many samples are available, Ludwig says, that “you could almost put them away and use them when you travel.” Hotels now feature more attractive amenities as well, he maintains. As a result, travelers may feel they can “leave the shampoo and conditioner behind.” With upscale kinds of products gracing their hotel rooms, guests don’t have to worry about having to leave their 8-oz shampoo bottle behind before heading through airport security, he says.

Pat Elvin, director of business operations for SD International (Wayne, NJ), says more and more customers are asking for sample packages “regimented in pouches six across” that contain products such as toner, daytime moisturizer, and nighttime moisturizer. Clients offer this smorgasbord of products in the hope of converting consumers into loyal users, she notes.

Given the current green-conscious zeitgeist, Gentile says that companies are looking for “as much information as possible about the environmental friendliness of the packaging” in order to appeal to consumer demand. He adds that a good percentage of companies are using packaging made from recycled materials. Others deem it more important that the packaging itself be recyclable rather than made of recycled materials, Gentile says.

Protecting Organic Products

Xela Pack is also seeing more products being sampled that have organic ingredients in them, including some with “active organics,” Gentile points out. When it was first certified to handle organic products, Xela Pack was initially more focused on trying to appeal to nutritional supplement and beverage manufacturers, he says. However, Xela Pack has spent most of its time working with personal care products such as Dr. Bronner’s soaps, he says.

After they’re opened, organics and other products risk contamination and loss of freshness. The convenience of small packaging can mitigate this risk, according to Ignacio Lopez, business development manager for LF of America (Hollywood, FL). Products with hormones in them or other products with a short shelf life are particularly prone to exposure problems in traditional containers, jars, and pump bottles. “After 30 days, whatever’s left is going to be pretty bad unless you fill [the container] with preservatives,” he says, adding that LF of America designs its sample packaging to minimize or eliminate the use of preservatives.

LF of America recently supplied unit-dose tubes for a retail kit for Lisa Hoffman Skincare. Melissa Pedrajita, director of business development for Lisa Hoffman Skincare, says, “We chose this specific packaging design because the airtight ampules allow us to use intense doses of highly efficacious ingredients. These ingredients would be unstable in traditional skin care packaging. Exposure to oxygen can cause many of the most effective skin care ingredients to instantly degrade.”

Once you expose personal care products to air “the clock starts running very quickly,” Hark agrees. Unette’s new Tear n’ Tuck tube features a reclosable top designed to protect skin care creams and other products from exposure to air, he says. The new tube was made in response to customer requests, and the biggest challenge was to design the container without adding any accessories to the package or fitments for the closure, he notes.

Unette has its own machine shop that enabled the company to engineer the reclosable die-cut tip, says Hark, adding that the goal was to make “an inexpensive nonrigid package that could be opened as many times as you like.” The Tear n’ Tuck is provided in ¼- to 2-oz fill sizes with a directional-flow tip, he says.

Secondary Packaging

Lopez and Ludwig both say that secondary packaging plays different roles that depend on whether the samples are giveaways or retail offerings. Secondary packaging for retail sales tends to carry much more information than giveaway packaging, which often has just “a simple envelope,” Lopez notes. Walgreens has an effective presentation in which the actual unit dose is placed on top of the box for the client to spot immediately, he says. This presentation is typically used for “treatment-type products where you can take the unit dose directly from the top of the box and use it.”

AGI Dermatics (Freeport, NY) is an LF of America client that has done well with LF’s clinical-looking container for a specialized sampler of skin care products given away through spas and dermatologists’ offices, Lopez says. There are five containers in individual pouches and in each pouch there’s a different product.

Product information is printed on both the container itself and the inside of the pouch. “It turns out to be very successful for [AGI Dermatics],” Lopez says, noting that AGI plans to expand on the concept by offering dedicated pouches with just one popular product, such as its DNA repair enzyme.

Elvin says that SD International uses vials, capsules, pouches, and cards in secondary packaging design “to convey the brand image.” Successful design usually mimics the look of the product. “We just did a piece for Coty that’s beautiful in picking up the colorations” of Coty’s CK Men and CK Women fragrances, she says.

Global Trends

Europe and China are more adventurous than the United States in their sample designs, according to Hark and Ludwig. Unette picked up a trend from Europe and now offers a liquid stick package, Hark says. “They’re a little less expensive than our proprietary packages, but they still offer one-hand directional-flow dispensing,” he points out. Cost and practicality are two main reasons for the European attraction, he believes. We seem to follow Europe on issues such as recycling, green manufacturing, and unit doses, he says.

Ludwig is not impressed by the overall level of sophistication in samples made in the United States. “To tell you the truth, there hasn’t been anything that’s particularly overwhelming as far as innovation,” he sighs. He admits that printing capabilities have improved and suppliers now have the ability to form containers in the same shapes as the samples, for instance, but “as far as innovation is concerned, I point to China.”

 

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