Bottles R Us

Berlin Packaging and Studio One Eleven Deliver Custom Turnkey Bottle Solutions

By Debora Toth

Later this month, grocery chains and drug stores nationwide will see a new bath soap addition on their shelves. Standing out among the rows of hand and body soap will be a giant happy-faced crayon with hands, feet, and a squeezable tummy. No doubt, children will not overlook this inviting character.

The Crayola Squeeze & Squirt Foaming Hand and Body Soap, an eye-catching interactive package, is a first for the century-old manufacturer of crayons beloved by many generations. Crayola licensee Schroeder and Tremayne decided to take those firm, fond attachments and translate them into a fun children's bath and body wash that squirts a stream of foam from bottles named after Crayola's famed crayons. Its first product, launched in 2003, was a cone-shaped package that roughly resemble a crayon tip. Due for an update, the firm searched for partners that could design an easily identifiable clever package for kids.

Bringing this brand extension to the market involved the research, design, and ingenuity of many talented people including Berlin Packaging, North America's largest stocking supplier of glass, plastic and metal containers and closures, and its full service in-house design division, Studio One Eleven.

From Concept to Crayola — in Ten Days

Berlin's Studio One Eleven brought Crayola's "Tip" character magically to life from concept to production in 10 days. The product is available in two flavors, Jazzberry Jam and Atomic Tangerine, named for colors found in Crayola crayon boxes. Each flavor is tinted and scented to match its name, with a clear PET bottle and shrink sleeve permitting the product color to show through. Studio One Eleven even had time to map and adjust for the correct shrink label distortion around Tip's hands, as shown in the "grid" picture.

"Our main philosophy for our customers is to increase sales, reduce costs, and improve productivity," says Andrew Berlin, president of Berlin Packaging. "We spend a lot of time educating our customers and helping them to differentiate themselves from their competitors and grab a consumer's eye and eventually their pocketbook." In the case of Crayola, says Berlin, it was a great method for the well-known crayon manufacturer to extend its brand image into another new category while utilizing the positive experiences and fond memories of their keystone product.

Berlin Packaging has been using this type of partnering with its clients for the past 17 years to post remarkable profits and sales. "Since we bought the company in 1988, we've quadrupled the firm's sales to a quarter-billion dollars," says Berlin. "We're now the nation's largest supplier of glass, plastic, and metal containers with 23 sales offices and distribution centers across the U.S. and 250 employees. We attribute our growth to finding and retaining the best talent in operations, sales, finance, design, and every other area of the business."

The firm believes that to continue this growth, it needs to keep introducing new innovations to help its clients quickly and easily design an outstanding package. For example, Studio One Eleven opened a new 3,000 square foot Chicago showroom to enable customers to transform custom plastic, glass, and metal packaging concepts into computer images and then 3D models in a matter of hours. The quick turnaround is possible with the capabilities of the agency's designers, state-of-the-art CAD software, and rapid prototyping, says Scott Jost, director of Studio One Eleven.

"Our new showroom will serve as a creative laboratory where clients can brainstorm with our designers, watch the team's collective ideas appear on the computer screen, and go home with 3D models created via high-definition, powder-based 3D printing technology," says Jost. "This is a first, and because it extends the company's status as the only agency to offer end-to-end package development services — literally from the imagination to the fill line."

For clients who are seeking a quick and cost-efficient method to design a package, Berlin Packaging unveiled a "Mix & Match" online catalog that enables brand, purchasing, and marketing managers to instantly generate images showing how different containers look with different closures. Accessible from the firm's home page, the catalog saves time by allowing users to test different scenarios on screen in order to zero in on the look they want.

Users simply click on the container of their choice, then on a button labeled "Your Mix & Match Options" to display the closures available with that item. A click on any closure instantly pairs the selected components, and another click changes the color of the cap, pump, or sprayer. Each container listing includes specifications from materials to minimum run size. Sample requests and queries can also be made directly from the catalog.

See it and spec it

"Our new interactive catalog helps speed packaging decisions and ensure satisfaction with the final product by enabling customers to explore as many different scenarios as they wish and design the look they want right on screen," says Guy Considine, Berlin's vice president of business development and design. "You can essentially design your own package, or at least narrow down the alternatives, even before you start sourcing."

This partnering philosophy is what led Crayola to collaborate with Berlin Packaging and Studio One Eleven. After perusing through Crayola's company manual and spotting the Tip character from the firm's brand portfolio, Studio One Eleven's designers incorporated the crayon character into the bottle structure as well as the full-body shrink sleeve. The 6-oz. bottle is shaped like a crayon with a cylindrical body and tapered top, tiny arms and feet are built into the mold, and a cartoon-type face beckons from the label.

Sales for six Weiman home care products jumped between 7% and 26% after Berlin's redesign (above) incorporated a larger label area, an embossed "W," and strong "shoulders."

The package is crowned by Emsar's new EcoFoam Squeeze Foamer, visually echoing the head of a crayon as well as producing the product's namesake "squeeze and squirt" capability. The dispenser allows children to produce a foamy soap by squeezing the belly of the crayon body rather than pumping the top. This not only contributes to the illusion of a crayon brought to life but also requires one hand rather than two, enabling kids to squeeze the foam directly onto any body part and even use it to draw on themselves for maximum play value.

"Fun" is a brand equity, too

"Parents are always looking for strategies to make getting clean more enjoyable for their kids, and we were looking for a new way to translate Crayola's brand equities of innovation, interactivity and fun to help ease the process," says Carla Schaeffer, brand manager at St. Louis-based Schroeder & Tremayne. "Studio One Eleven came up with several dozen concepts that included weaving the personality traits of the Tip character into an interactive package. We think it is an excellent solution that is fresh, appealing, and instantly identifiable on the shelf."

In addition to the branding strategy and package design, Studio One Eleven provided graphic, structural and sourcing services. The Studio One Eleven team created the label graphics, including customized fonts; sourced both the bottle and the shrink sleeve from China, worked directly with the supplier in China to produce the mold, recommended and sourced Emsar's EcoFoam Squeeze Foamer, and delivered all components to Schroeder & Tremayne's filler for final production.

Berlin and Studio One Eleven gave Sergeant's pet care products a high-end look with attractive and functional rippling curves on a custom 18-oz. PET bottle specifically engineered to look tall and still provide sufficient billboard label area.

Jost explains the development exploration for Tip: "When we got the creative brief and licensee charter for this project, we not only looked at Crayola's brand equities but also gathered every personal care product for children that we could find, documented it, played with it, and applied our understanding of how kids interact with things to come up with our creative concepts. Then we used our structural design knowledge to create a functional package, our industry knowledge to recommend Emsar's new squeeze foamer technology, and our global connections to bring in a quality product at a good price."

Having the ability to draw upon international suppliers and its own warehouse of packaging components helps Berlin Packaging expand its special niche in the collaboration chain. Berlin Packaging supplies a wide array of products to end customers in the food, chemical, personal care, and pharmaceutical industries, such as glass bottles and jars, plastic bottles and jars, dispensing and non-dispensing plastic closures, metal closures, metal and plastic paint cans, trigger sprayers, and dispensing pumps.

All of Berlin's global suppliers go through a rigorous screening process to ensure that they meet strict quality assurance, on-time delivery and social compliance standards, as well as offering competitive pricing. This initial screening, performed by Berlin's global sourcing team, is passed by only one out of eight global suppliers evaluated. Ongoing quality control functions are performed by the same team and product development/design personnel. Today, Berlin imports roughly 20% of the billions of containers and closures it sells annually, doing what is believed to be twice the global business volume of any other U.S. packaging distributor.