Fragrance Bottles: The Stock Market
To make a stock bottle look custom,
New High Glass added leopard-print fabric to the bottle’s cap.
Say “perfume bottle,” and many people envision bottles that are ornate, one of a kind—and probably produced from custom molds. Retail customers don’t always realize (or need to know) that many fragrance bottles are stock designs. Using advanced decorating techniques, accessories, and caps, stock bottles can look just as custom today as a one-of-a-kind mold.
There are many benefits to using stock bottles. Lower costs and speed to market are definitely primary. Earlier this year, ABA Packaging Corp. (Holtsville, NY) became the distributor of a high-end line of heavyweight glass fragrance bottles from European glass manufacturer Saverglass. The bottles, which are stocked in France, can typically be delivered in approximately four to six weeks and can be supplied at low minimums.
“If a company wants a high-end fragrance bottle but doesn’t want to spend $30,000 on tooling, it can use a bottle line like this,” said Charles Marchese, ABA Packaging’s vice president of marketing and sales. “It’s like having your own upscale private mold, without the cost.”
The number of stock bottles available on the market gives brands a multitude of bottle styles to choose from. “We continue to update a vast assortment of standard bottles that are not just ordinary shapes that are common among glass manufacturers, but that are truly new and fresh shapes that can be easily customized with various decorations,” says Emmanuel Mazzei, CEO of glass bottle provider Heinz Glas USA (Linden, NJ). “With such options, we feel that we can satisfy the speed-to-market requests that seem to have become more common in this ever more competitive market.”
Mazzei continues, “It is our various state-of-the-art decoration techniques that really add to the value of these standard items and allow the bottles to portray a very custom look.” Among the decorating that Heinz Glas can do, often in combination, are spraying (both complete and masked spraying), silk-screening, pad printing, metallizing (including laser-removed metallizing), and engraving. The firm has also applied stones and plaques to fragrance bottles, which Mazzei says is currently a big trend.
Suppliers often offer caps and dispensers to match the stock bottles they sell. “We offer a large number of standard bottle shapes and sizes that can be matched with interchangeable polypropylene or Surlyn caps from our cap division,” says Mazzei.
ABA Packaging’s new Saverglass line of high-end, heavyweight stock bottles for fragrances.
ABA Packaging also offers unique caps, dispensers, and decoration. “We stock a wide range of components, so you really can kind of mix and match and get a finished package that looks beautiful and custom,” says ABA’s Jennifer Wolfe.
For a woman’s fragrance called Sarkany Women, glass supplier New High Glass (Miami, FL) recently customized a cap for the supplier’s 100-ml Delacroix stock bottle, adding a strip of leopard-print material to the cap. The square, masculine cap lent the stock bottle a unique look almost like that of a men’s cologne bottle. The same leopard print was also replicated on the carton to make the entire package feel customized.
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