Packaging is the ultimate vehicle for design: industrial, graphic, and typographic design are all put to the test to create an impression so meaningful that it converts currency into consumerism. This ...
By Ron Romanik
Avery Dennison is diving into the active packaging business with three new "active label" products. With a portfolio comprised of the TT Sensor™ Time-Temperature Indicator, an Anti-Microbial active label, and an Air Release active label, the company is creating its own niche within active packaging and giving package designers some compelling new tools.
Avery Dennison is a Fortune 500 company perhaps best known as one of the world's leading office product and label suppliers. What is less known is that the firm actually boasts a vastly diverse product line including everything from decorative surfaces used in automobile interiors, high-tech fastening and joining materials, highly stylized appliance nameplates, components for HVAC, sound and vibration absorbing materials, in-mold labeling systems, and even cutting-edge RFID.
"Our expertise in engineering runs quite deep within the organization," says Michel Merkx, general manager of Avery Dennison's Industrial Division. "Active packaging--specifically active labels in this case--is a market we approach from a considerably strong position thanks to the knowledge we've gained in designing such a broad range of solutions."
As an industry leader, Avery Dennison has been pushing the technological envelope since its 1935 founding, when a young entrepreneur by the name of Stan Avery manufactured the world's first self-adhesive label. Given the company's 70-year history of engineering and technical advancement, Merkx views the company's new active labeling portfolio as a natural extension.
"At Avery Dennison we don't just make and sell labels," says Merkx. "We provide our customers with cost-reducing and labor-saving solutions that address unmet needs. The extension into Active Packaging really draws on that orientation. We're confident that designers will find these innovations to be extremely valuable in developing the next generation of packaging for their clients in a range of industries."
From its home in the Cleveland suburb of Strongsville, the Industrial Division engineered and developed the new active labels at the request of current and prospective customers, and the TT Sensor™, Air Release, and Anti-Microbial products are all discretely designed to meet specific unmet needs.
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