Engineered for Flexibility

At TricorBraun, Options Always Promote Growth

by Noel Jeffrey

TricorBraun Design & Engineering worked with BF Ascher & Company to design the Pretty Feet & Hands bottle as an inverted dispensing package with a soft, gentle appearance, aided by the pearlescent resin.

Using the tagline "Because Our Options Make the Difference," TricorBraun's brand message is clear and consistent. The company, headquartered in St. Louis, offers customers options for design, engineering, and global sourcing. It also handles logistics management for moving product and/or inventory and for warehouse services including just-in-time delivery and backup inventory.

Keith Strope, TricorBraun president and CEO, says, "We're committed to continue to invest in design and engineering and global sourcing both domestic and international to offer customers the best and most appropriate packaging for their product and also to manage their needs as required."

Indeed, investing is an ongoing process for the company. Strope says TricorBraun is the largest in the industry in terms of rigid packaging distribution. The company has 35 office and distribution centers, including sales offices and two design and engineering centers located in the greater Chicago and Los Angeles areas. Division TricorBraun International has offices in China and France. "We're growing organically and through acquisitions," says Strope. TricorBraun has acquired seven companies since 1996—primarily rigid packaging distribution businesses. They look for very experienced companies with both a good customer base and a synergistic relationship with TricorBraun's business.

The latest acquisition is Cal-West Tool & Mold, a global supplier for blow molds out of Corona, CA. Craig Sawicki, executive vice president TricorBraun design and engineering, explains that the company's design arm had been working with Cal-West for a number of years. "Now, in-house engineering adds seamless transition to tooling and mold construction," says Sawicki. "We've enhanced our customer's speed to market. We can transmit our files to them and cutting steel starts within hours of a purchase order."

George Dempsey, TricorBraun executive vice president, stresses the advantage of this combination. "Design and engineering is now a seamless process," Dempsey says. "Engineers make the working tool, and we can select the appropriate manufacturer. It gives us great flexibility with our supplier partners. We can run anywhere. No one that I'm aware of has this kind of design combined with engineering competence—this kind of integrated product."

Dempsey also explains that all the package manufacturing is subcontracted. They do the design and molds and ship to the designated vendor. They can also provide logistic support and global manufacturing sources, a value-added service to compliment customer needs.

Diversified markets

Strope points out that growth enables the company to offer more services to a range of customers. "We serve both multinationals and middle market companies," he says. "Our power alley is middle market." Currently, he breaks the company's markets into:

• Personal Care - 30%
• Health & Pharmaceuticals - 26%
• Food & Beverages - 20 %
• Industrial/Household Chemicals - 15%
• Miscellaneous - 9%

Sawicki also says that although the company is probably most experienced in personal care, that experience is easily translated to other markets. Currently, he acknowledges that they are moving decisively into high-end liquor markets. "Food and industrial chemicals have always had to have functional packaging," he says. "Until recently they were sheltered from the requirements of eye-catching packaging that personal care products have always required."

He explains that first requirement of a package is shelf appeal that attracts consumers and gets them to understand what it is and touch it within two or three seconds. According to Sawicki, "If a consumer touches the package, 80% of the time it goes in the cart. Then the package has to function well. Assuming that the product works, we can provide consumers with a good experience. The secondary consideration here is the ’Äòrebuy.' The package has to offer efficacy and durability because the consumer is going to consider the rebuy when the package is empty, used up. The package should look decent at the end of its life."

What's more, Sawicki maintains that a well-designed package can help TricorBraun's clients make more money. He cites Grey Goose Vodka as an example of how packaging that clearly shows the product is a premium item allowed the company to raise the retail price and thus increase margins.

Sawicki recalls how the squeezable plastic ketchup bottles with different colored ketchups increased market share for the brand owner. "Some people thought they would cannibalize their own brand," he says, "But this success shows that if you can segment a market you can increase price. In personal care that's more difficult because everyone's doing it."

TricorBraun collaborated with Marc Fagelman of Shell Oil Inc. to create a radical packaging concept for dispensing the Rain-X product.

Tools for translation

To design a package, Sawicki says they use true 3-D CAD Pro/Engineer software from PTC and SolidWorks from the company of the same name. They also use an Alias product for the design industry to display the CAD files for customers. "The files appear to be a true photo image," Sawicki notes.

In addition to the latest software, the company has recently added a second Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) machine for in-house prototyping to keep up with demand. FDM is another rapid prototyping method like stereo lithography. It uses a solid-based method that extrudes material, layer-by-layer, to build the model. Sawicki notes that although having this capability in-house really saves time, overall time to market really depends on how the customer makes decisions. If there's a single decision maker, the design can be approved in a single day, and that person can leave with a model by 4 p.m. When decisions are made by committee, it depends on how agile the members are in getting approvals.

Method and TricorBraun continue to innovate with a reservoir cap that allows consumers to measure out the detergent without removing the cap.

In addition to custom design services, the company also offers RapidFind on its web site, www.tricorbraun.com This database contains some 40,000 different stock bottles, several thousand of which are proprietary to TricorBraun and the remainder of which are from vendor partners. "We sell a ton of stock bottles," Sawicki says, "For many things they are perfectly adequate, but my gig is to design custom stuff."

That's understandable since the company is a consistent award winner in industry competitions. According to Sawicki, they have taken 38 awards in worldwide package design competitions in the past two-and-a-half years. They captured AmeriStar awards from the Institute of Packaging Professionals in each of the last four years, and taken Best of Show in the National Association of Container Distributors (NACD) competition in three of the last five years, and this year received a WorldStar Award for the ergonomic design of the EcoLab Redi-Pac cleanser dispensing bottle.

Service and services

The Rapid Find web site service is an open service and knowledge base. TricorBraun clients also benefit from the secured T-CAP Customer portal on the web site. There, George Dempsey explains, each client can access their own information and generate certain reports, like open order reports. "They see an exact mirror of what we have. It provides full visibility of their supply chain," Dempsey says.

Dempsey points out that the logistics management and global sourcing services allow the company to work with large and small companies alike. For example, distribution centers in a given area will aggregate orders so that full truckloads or railcars can be used. He also says that customers with lower volume orders for custom package designs can go offshore for about the same price as buying stock items.

"We have the resources to manage the logistical process," says Dempsey. "It's a huge win for these companies. Five years ago only the leading brand marketers had this available to them. Our engineering group gives us the universal language—math. U.S. based manufacturers have locations all over the world. Today engineers tool and send files to other engineers who may not speak the same language. Math breaks down the barriers."

Global sourcing and partnerships can also mean more than manufacturing. Last February the company entered into an exclusive agreement for the manufacture and distribution of integrated desiccant technology from Sasaki Chemical in Kyoto, Japan. The resulting product, DryKeep, is a multilayered bottle that Dempsey says is ideal for vitamins, some drugs, and especially gel cap vitamins. "Its key attribute is that it doesn't saturate quickly and preserves its efficacy even after the bottle is opened. That means a stable environment that allows the consumer to use all of the product," he says.

Opening up markets

Although TricorBraun is the brand name most widely known in the market, it is the largest segment of the holding company Kranson Industries. The company's other subsidiary is Caliber WinePak, a supplier of wine bottles and related products headquartered in Benicia, CA.

The Kranzberg family of St. Louis formed the company in 1902 and founded Kranson Industries as a holding company in 1977. Today, Ken Kranzberg, the grandson of the founding family, serves as Chairman of the Board. He opened Northwestern's first branch office in 1967. The company's philosophy was to open more locations, each offering a top sales staff with personal service. In April, he was awarded the 2005 NACD Achievement Award. He served as president of NACD from 1986-88 and on a number of its committees throughout the years. The name TricorBraun came after a series of acquisitions in the 1990s.

Under CEO Keith Strope, the growth philosophy continues. "We'll be a $500 million company this year," he says. "About $450 million is attributable to Tricor-Braun and $55 million to Caliber WinePak." While finding the right acquisitions is helpful to the company's continued ability to grow and thrive, Strope adds another element. "I feel we have the best personnel in the industry," Strope says. "The key to any successful business is to have the right people in the right places."

Sawicki sums it up this way: "We believe that our clients know their products and how they want to brand them. We are good at interpreting what marketing groups want. We point out what can be done with their brand as opposed to rebranding. We take what marketing wants and translate that to a package."