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Good design often goes hand in hand with sky-high prices – witness Charles Eames’s Barcelona chair or the Jaguar E-type. But the reverse can be true in packaging, where good design can actually reduce costs and provide a return on investment by increasing sales revenues.

The Design Council says good design has the potential to increase turnover in any business by £225 for every £100 spent. And that doesn’t include the potential savings in packaging production costs.

When Bausch & Lomb (B&L) wanted to produce a new contact lens pack for Japan, Design Bridge developed a ‘yin and yang’ pack that increased production rates by 400%, reduced the quantity of plastic used by 40% and aluminium foil by 38%, improved pallet utilisation by 65%, and created a 60% reduction in freight costs compared to other B&L contact lens packs.

The new pack is half the size of previous designs, so it’s not surprising it allows such significant cost savings, but even that has not been enough to cause B&L to introduce the pack to other markets where it already has production lines.

The change would be too expensive, says Nick Verebelyi, director of 3D branding at Design Bridge. “It was only possible where new lines were being implemented. It’s not something you can implement in existing lines. That’s a big barrier to change,” he says.

Materials waste reduction and the associated cost savings is an area with fewer barriers to change. Vision in Print (ViP) runs courses on how to save as much as 5% of materials.

Food and pharmaceutical label specialist Label Apeel in Leicester is one company that has seen real benefits after attending one of ViP’s five-day courses.

Previously, the company had accepted raw material spend as an unavoidable operating cost, but managing director Stuart Kellock says the ViP programme has focused its attention on material waste, which was around 16% of its annual material spend of £1m. “We have now achieved a reduction in waste of more than 60% in unrequired overs,” says Kellock. The company’s projected benefits are £96,000 from reduced overs and £7,000 from improved management of part reels of material.

Materials trials
Faraday Packaging materials and devices network manager Dr Laurence Hogg says producers have to be proactive enough to commission materials data trials themselves, if they want to cut cost out of their manufacturing systems, and that designers have few places to turn if they want to understand how different materials could work with their designs. Without a central source of information to tell them what a material can and can’t do, those who haven’t the money to invest in trials have hit a glass ceiling.

Faraday has recently launched the online Packaging Materials Exchange as part of the Materials Knowledge Transfer Network. Hogg says this service will provide a forum for members of the industry to discuss the latest news and information about packaging materials or to get advice from the Packaging Materials Advisory Group.

However, Hogg says that packaging is lagging behind other industries in its attempts to optimise materials use and that it should learn from what is being done in the aerospace and automotive industries. Here, software programs, loaded with the relevant materials test data, can be used to alter product design to make better use of resources, either by using less, by using different materials or by using materials manufactured by a different process.

In the meantime, it might make financial sense to work with a packaging consultant to develop packaging that costs less. Alison Vincent is an independent consultant who says there are a variety of ways to save money, including reducing the amount of packaging; reducing the number of components in a pack; reducing the cost of component manufacture; using more generic pack shapes with bespoke labels; and using a cheaper print process.

Vincent says of clients wanting to save costs: “Very often if they are looking at a current pack and they want to stay with the same format, we could look at lightweighting– using less material – but also reducing the weight of the labels etc.”

While lightweighting sounds like an environmental policy that could be expensive to implement, Vincent says companies have been trying to use less material for years to save costs. Still, she says: “It’s quite surprising the number of people who have not looked at it in the past so, in percentage terms, they have more to gain.”

One of Vincent’s recent projects demonstrates the sort of lateral thinking that is needed to cut costs.
“We looked at designing a standardised bottle. We wanted to take the complexity of creating the seal out of the neck design and make it part of the closure manufacture, which is already more expensive. The bottle’s a lot cheaper and lighter with a slightly more expensive closure. But overall you have made a substantial saving,” says Vincent.

Vincent emphasises that it is important for designers to work with manufacturers to understand what can be achieved.

Other factors
Design Bridge’s Verebelyi agrees that it is on the production line that significant costs can be either incurred or saved. “Material is cheap,” he says. “The problem is really to do with labour. Materials are a hell of a lot cheaper, so reducing materials use does not deliver as much cost savings as one would imagine.” While cutting materials is sometimes the only way to cut costs, some producers will use more materials if it allows for more automation on the production lines, he says.

Designers should also talk to manufacturers and packer/fillers the minute they come up with a new pack concept. Packaging technologist Keith Barnes says designers’ enthusiasm for doing new things can be the cause of much expense. Designers might think ‘why don’t we see more round packaging? Perhaps I should design a spherical bottle to stand out from the crowd’. But Barnes explains why spherical packs don’t pay: “Anything spherical is costly because when it goes down a production line it takes up more space. It is difficult to put labels on and often the only thing you can do to get all the required information on a spherical pack is to put a shrink sleeve on, which adds to the production costs.”

Concern with the cost of implementing new systems has put many people off trying something new in the past.

Retail revolutions
A response to the recent introduction by Waitrose of Calon Wen milk, packed in flexible plastic bags, sums up how those with an eye on the purse-strings think about revolutionising packaging. Jim Begg of Dairy UK says, if the environmental benefits of milk packed this way can be proved, there could be a big change in the way British people buy milk. However, he adds: “What you’re seeing now I think is going to be an emerging trend. [But] it’s expensive to make any new form of packaging and operational systems, and we have to be confident it’s going to have a meaningful effect.”

The Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) published its online Guide to Evolving Packaging Design in May to help packaging designers understand how to make a meaningful effect on the environment without increasing costs.

The guide aims to help designers understand why consumers want packaging to change, how the law says it has to change, and why it can make good business sense.

It offers advice on how to reduce packaging costs by cutting raw materials costs, cut distribution costs by improving pallet loading, and cut the cost of compliance with growing legal obligations. With reference sources like this, designers should be better able to reduce the financial – as well as the environmental – impact of their pack.

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WORKPLACE DESIGN
Better workplace design can improve safety, productivity, customer perception and cut costs, says Vision in Print.

The productivity and competitiveness assessment and training firm has been running courses on leaner manufacturing for the print and packaging industry since 2003. It says that companies must optimise productivity for long-term security and growth.

It runs materials waste reduction programmes, shares lean manufacturing techniques that should reduce human effort and make better use of capital investment, space and time, and has a five-step workplace organisation course to improve safety, productivity and customer perception as well as cut costs.
Its 5C workplace organisation recommends that firms:

• Clearout: Get rid of all unnecessary equipment and other items from the work area

• Clean and check: Inspect machinery for faults or damage, maintain and rationalise office equipment. A tracking system should then be established to follow this up, all part of the continuous improvement process

• Configure: Every remaining required item should be configured with a clearly defined and labelled storage space

• Conform: Standards of cleanliness and organisation for the workplace are defined and audits and charts arranged to ensure results are monitored and sustained

• Custom and practice: Employees need to realise the benefits of 5C and develop the habits to make it part of the custom and everyday practice of the firm