It’s no secret that the packaging world is always changing. Whether it’s consumer demands, climate bills, geopolitical effects, or pandemic repercussions—there will always be expected and unexpected pain points throughout your supply chain.

While we can’t always control these factors, we can improve resilience against them by keeping an open mind when it comes to our packaging solutions.

It sounds nice on paper, but how do we actually do it?

First, we always take a client-centric approach and maintain it throughout the entire supply chain. That means we’re always optimizing our processes based on your needs, not a “one-size-fits-all” packaging solution.

This approach has led us to new supply chain solutions—sometimes naturally, but oftentimes through a lot of time and effort. One example of such solutions is our hybrid supply chain offering. It allows you to keep your production offshore, move it onshore, or blend the two depending on what’s the most efficient for your use case.

Let’s dive into what that looks like in practice.

Identifying Your Supply Chain Pain(s)

With greenhouse gas emissions, freight costs, and tariffs —there are so many factors to consider when optimizing your supply chain. You’ve probably experienced the burden of one or more of these supply chain pains.

• Carbon Emissions: Global shipping emits over 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually. On average, 80% of a company’s GHG emissions come from its supply chain.
• Freight Costs: Since the beginning of the pandemic, ocean freight costs have more than quadrupled.
• Trade Tariffs: As a result of 2018 tariffs imposed on imports from China, Americans have accumulated over $80 billion in extra tax costs.

Which of these has directly impacted your supply chain?

On top of all of this, we’ve seen a change in consumer demand: 73% of consumers are willing to change their purchasing patterns to reduce their environmental impact. With 80% of emissions coming from your supply chain, we understand that there’s increasing pressure to improve in this area.

That’s what we’re here to help you do.

Our Approach

As a client-centric company, we’ve been developing solutions to these pain points for years. We’ve established a skilled team that’s dedicated to optimizing our supply chain solutions on multiple levels.

1. Automation: Over the last five years, our team members have used OEM principles to automate specific processes in the supply chain that may have previously introduced bottlenecks. This is not to say that we’ve replaced skilled laborers with machines. Rather, we’ve developed hybrid solutions that maximize efficiency while maintaining a unique, creative touch through skilled human labor.
2. Engineering: In addition to automation, we’re always engineering new packaging solutions. We use our technical expertise to identify ways we can optimize packaging, cut costs and materials, and reduce our environmental impacts—in turn doing the same for your business. What does that actually mean in practice? Looking at one client case study, we were able to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 33% per unit, fossil fuel use by 22% per unit, water use by 20% per unit, and end-of-life landfill potential by 35%. On top of that, we increased end-of-life recycling potential by 40%. And this is just the beginning.
3. New Facilities: We’ve opened new facilities in Europe, America, and Central America. Just five years ago, 95% of our manufacturing took place in Asia. Now that figure has reduced to roughly 70%, as much of our manufacturing occurs near our clients’ distribution centers. We can now offer you more options for manufacturing closer to home.

In other words, we’ve done the work, so you don’t have to. By transitioning our own manufacturing to a hybrid solution (both nearshore and offshore, human-powered and automated) to maximize efficiency, we can apply the same model to your business.

Our Solutions

Using the approach above, we’ve been able to provide more sustainable packaging solutions for our clients, some of which include:

• Sustainable and/or Recycled Materials: While there’s so much more to sustainable packaging than materials, we offer plenty of eco-friendly materials that ensure components are easily separable to increase reuse/recycling potential. The engineering practices outlined above allow us to accomplish this, along with our access to innovative materials such as molded pulp, crinkle paper shreds, paper pads, corrugates, paper foam, and more.
• Domestic Manufacturing: Our regional manufacturing facilities give you the option to produce onshore (fully or partially) to improve resiliency against geopolitical impacts and reduce your carbon footprint.
• Warehouse Space: We have 1.2 million square feet of warehousing (and counting), so you have the option to produce half overseas, and half domestically if you decide.
• Flexibility: Our innovative and ever-evolving supply chain solution template can be applied to any scenario at any moment, whether it’s your company or the world (or both) that’s experiencing a seismic shift.

With these solutions, we can help you reduce emissions, navigate tariff and freight costs, and focus on continuous improvement every step of the way. In an uncertain world where the only constant is change, feel at ease with our ever-evolving packaging solutions.