Packaging Machinery - News, Technology and Reviews

Bespoke, another term for custom made, accurately describes the packaging needs faced by manufacturers of pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and all manner of products having unusually shaped and often fragile characteristics.

Materials: Bespoke packaging can involve the use of several packing materials, ranging from wood to plastic, to corrugated fiberboard or a combination of any of these materials. Bampton Packaging offers expert advisors well versed in fitting the customer’s packaging needs to the best suitable materials and most cost effective packaging machines.

Carton Board: Cardboard, or otherwise known as carton-board, is currently used for thousands of bespoke packaging applications. One worldwide supplier of custom designed packages is Colpac. They will design a carton (with services from an in-house studio) to the customer’s specifications, producing a sample for you before you actually order a large supply. They offer 2,000 dies to further cut manufacturing expenses, by simply applying your company logo to one of their proven shapes.

Cost: Bespoke packaging usually means a more expensive package. However, RPC has come up with a design flexible tooling concept that changes all that. The design allows flexibility, with only minor modifications, to create custom brand identified packages without the usual costs. Several high-end cosmetic companies use their packages.

Medicines: One of the major uses of bespoke packaging is to deliver pharmaceuticals. Not only are these usually fragile, they often have a critically short time period for use at a hospital. Delays in packaging will mean that the product must be scrapped, as each step in the pharmaceutical process must be validated. Schneider Electric and PES Technology have joined forces to accomplish this important and complicated operation so well that in an entire year there have been no interruptions in the bespoke packaging line. To further understand their challenges, the product has traceable bar codes, which tell what are the accessories to pack with which carton, confirmation of weight checks, motion control, package strappers and shrink wrappers. With all this, PES coordinates the validation process in accordance with current US Federal regulations, instead of having a separate validation process at each step.

Even though many of the aspects of bespoke packaging have been mentioned above, there is much more to be learned regarding the equipments, types of packing and so on. Design Plus Packaging Ltd of Lancaster England offers a range of services from hand packing to large manufacturing operations, to direct mailing functions, using a variety of packaging solutions for almost every company.